Catherine Murphy is one of a handful of artists who changed observational painting between the 1960s and ’80s, when painting’s dominance was being contested. Murphy, along with Lois Dodd, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and others, learned from abstraction and found a way to expand the parameters of observational painting, overturn assumptions regarding the relationship of two- to three-dimensionality, build upon predecessors’ innovations in composition, and pursue preoccupations with unlikely subject matter.
Famous for painting at a slow pace, a Murphy exhibition is an event. Her commitment to Heraclitean observation means that you cannot step in the same river twice — she does not work in series, and her drawings and paintings form two discrete bodies of work within her oeuvre.
The nine oil paintings and eight graphite drawings that comprise Catherine Murphy: Recent Work at Peter Freeman, Inc. are all in different sizes, reflecting the range of her practice. This detail is most apparent in four drawings (all 2024) depicting the back of a woman’s head, in most cases wrapped in a kerchief.
Despite the similarity of the subject, each piece is a distinct size and shape based on the composition. Likewise, each scarf is patterned differently, as indicated by the titles — “Plaid,” “Ships,” “Leopard Skin,” and “Scalloped” — and every subject wears it in a unique way. The longer we look at the drawings, the more dissimilar they appear, and, more importantly, the more personalized the relationship between the wearer and the scarf becomes, even though we never see anyone’s face.
These drawings are not about fashion. The kerchiefs’ apparently inexpensive materials and familiar patterns and images suggest a desire for working- and middle-class people to express their individuality. This is the quietly radical current running through Murphy’s work: She has neither forgotten her working-class background nor made her personal experience the subject of her art. Her celebration of the beauty of the everyday is another quality her art shares with that of Dodd and Plimack Mangold. (An exhibition of their work, as well as the legions of artists they have influenced, is long overdue.)
“No ideas but things,” the poet William Carlos Williams famously said, emphasizing the importance of the concrete over theory. Murphy always places the viewer in a specific physical and visual relationship to the scene. In “Under the Table” (2022), we are looking up at the underside of a round red table, where four people sit with white linen napkins on their laps. Her ability to convey various textures transports the painting into a realm where the tactile and the optical have become inseparable.
In “Under the Table,” the point of view seems to be that of a small toddler standing right next to the table. None of the adults are paying attention to the viewer, who is not quite a voyeur — a voyeur does not wish to be discovered. Set against the room’s red walls, the view slowly reveals itself. Murphy makes us look and look again without explaining what we are seeing, and implicates us in the scene; this is her genius. Her formal mastery is devoted to making the ordinary inexplicable, causing us to look inward and reflect upon what we are seeing.
She is particularly attuned to how seeing is haunted by an awareness of mortality. In “Bed Clothes” (2023), a red shirt, patterned skirt, and yellow socks are casually laid out on a bed, as if they had been arranged in the form of an absent body. Absence is also felt in “Double Bed” (2022), identically sized pendant paintings separated by two inches, depicting two pillows piled on a bed, each indented where a head once lay. The work brought to mind the last line of John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 1”: “and empty grows every bed.”
“Harry’s Office” (2023) is a cropped, close-up view of shelves crammed with papers and packages. The office belongs to Murphy’s husband, Harry Roseman. We appear to be bent over or seated at the desk looking for something. As calm, straightforward, detailed, and tender as the painting is, it is underscored by an unknown sense of urgency. The palette of yellows, browns, beiges, and tans, accented with green and red, may reflect the actual office, but it evokes late afternoon, time passing, and the disordered remnants and records inevitably left behind.
“Still Living” (2024) brings the viewer face to face with a gaping gash in a tree trunk. Murphy’s meticulous attention to small, discrete sections of the tree goes against generalization and painterly shorthand, and causes our attention to refocus constantly — from looking at the multi-sectioned, blocky bark, we might zero in on the striated interior. From the leaves of the trees to the blasted trunk, she moves section to section, and hue to hue. The accumulation of details, and the taut balance she maintains between each leaf and the entire view, is astonishing, majestic, and unsettling. As the painting’s title tells us, we are looking into an exposed wound of a “still living” organism. Like the other works we encounter in this deeply absorbing exhibition, we may still be alive, but the irrefutable evidence of our absence is everywhere.
Catherine Murphy: Recent Work continues at Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.