Catherine Murphy graduated from the Pratt Institute of New York in 1967. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture during the summer of 1966. Her complex figurative work deals mostly with simple, everyday subjects, without drawing from photographic material. The repetition of patterns, such as crosses, and of specific scenes within the picture through the use of mirroring processes, reflections and a sense of geometry, are as many elements that pull her work toward abstraction. The painter pays special attention to light, surface and reflections.
In an interview with Francine Prose for Bomb Magazine (No. 53, 1995), she said about her interest in capturing light at a precise moment: “I am a compulsive Abstract Expressionist”. In saying so, not only does she reveal a true intention and desire to seize movements, rhythms and light, which she expresses as accurately as possible, but also her flirtation with the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Murphy was awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1979 and 1989, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant in 1986, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, and in 2002 was inducted a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Murphy was appointed senior critic in painting/printmaking at Yale in 1989.
