The University of Kansas

Elizabeth Murray

United States, born 1940
Chaotic Lip, 1986
Oil on shaped canvas
Gift of the Friends of the Art Museum and the Helen Foresman Spencer Acquisitions Fund, 87.35

Elizabeth Murray, whose use of paint is more personally expressive, also is concerned with the essential characteristics of artistic form. In Chaotic Lip she experiments by shaping the canvas and leaving the construction process visible– the edges ragged, staples showing, and canvas exposed. She also explores the tension between two-dimensional space. Is this a painting, or is it a sculpture? Murray combines highly personal references, which are often difficult to decode, with these formal concerns.