Stay Awake
Artist: Elizabeth Murray (American, 1940-2007)
Date: 1989
Dimensions:
70 × 89 × 23 in. (177.8 × 226.1 × 58.4 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds given by Rita Barbour Kern
Object number: 2018.17
Label Text:A singular artist who defies easy categorization, Elizabeth Murray had a style that was uniquely her own. Looking at Stay Awake, you might wonder if it’s a painting or a sculpture. It is literally paint on canvas, but Murray laid the canvas onto a wooden armature that extends almost two feet from the wall. The resulting twisting and rolling form allows for simultaneous interior and exterior spaces. Resembling a warped coffee cup (a common theme for Murray) or perhaps a human heart, Stay Awake challenges perceptions of what painting is or can be.
The colors, shapes, and patterns of Stay Awake and her other works of this period speak to Murray’s immersion in the everyday life and culture of New York City. She said in 1997, “I am a woman, I’m a mom, I’m a wife, I’m a painter. I live in a city where I see bright graffiti everywhere. And I was raised on comics and cartoons. I loved their graphic quality, how things jumped off the page. All of it gets in there.”
The colors, shapes, and patterns of Stay Awake and her other works of this period speak to Murray’s immersion in the everyday life and culture of New York City. She said in 1997, “I am a woman, I’m a mom, I’m a wife, I’m a painter. I live in a city where I see bright graffiti everywhere. And I was raised on comics and cartoons. I loved their graphic quality, how things jumped off the page. All of it gets in there.”
Description"Stay Awake extends almost two feet from the wall and is part of a series of elaborately shaped, exuberantly colored canvases that Murray began making in the 1980's. The apparently bulbous form of Stay Awake on closer inspection, is quite compressed, as are the little squares and diamonds projecting from its surface. More often, though, Murray is playing the formal details of her images against corresponding choices in texture or armature to knit pictorial and physical depth into a single imaginative arena."--Will Heinrich, New York Times, Dec. 26, 2017
On view