Judith Murray was born in New York City in 1941 but spent much of her childhood in southern Florida where she lived near the ocean. The ocean became a part of her life and she spent hours there almost every day. Murray arrived in New York to study painting at Pratt Institute in 1958, which totally reinforced her passion to be a painter.
Murray’s paintings have a uniquely personal language. The ‘70s paintings exhibited stark and incisive shapes and textures using the color in red, white, yellow and black her lifelong signature palette. A thin stripe down the right-hand edge of the canvas that first appeared in these works has also become a permanent element in all her paintings, in effect anchoring the rest of the canvas to the picture’s frame as well as creating a personal system. Over the years, she has remained faithful to the use of only these four colors, mixing and combining them to produce a seemingly infinite variety of shades and hues. The discipline of restricting herself to this palette has given a kind of subliminal freedom, even invisible stability to the body of her work. Working in various size canvases in 1989 she developed large paintings of increased intensity in which mostly short brushstrokes are seen literally scrambling and chasing each other in patterns across the canvas. In the most recent paintings, precisely placed among the animated brushstrokes are refined abstract shapes creating an unusual equation of tension and expansion and dialogue. This gives the paintings a broad new identity while still maintaining her personal signature.
She received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award for Painting and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. She has been a member of the American Abstract Artists since 1985. Murray has lived and worked in the same loft in New York City since 1973. She also spends time near the ocean on Sugarloaf Key, Florida.
