Amy Sillman, who describes abstract painters as “doomed to work in between hoping and groping,” has provided the premier example of how far a painting can be pushed and brought back; her canvases teem with stop-and-start traces, film-still swipes of action, and veils of limbs bending time like metastatic clock faces. The stakes of abstraction, of “lumpen form,” as Sillman has written, can have to do with “body politics” and “care and repair,” or with “merely try[ing] to beam out an electrifyingly personal and strange signal that wakes up the receiver for a moment—one weird moment that could shift the sense of things.” Strange and weird point to the unknown, and to the simple paradox that a painting is something you make because you’ve never seen it before. So what happens in finishing is a fastening of the mind’s kernel to the pulp of this world.
Considering the towering presence of Elizabeth Murray’s paintings in the trajectory of American abstraction at the end of the last century, it has become somewhat rare to come across a full-blown exhibition of her drawings. Presumably this isn’t because of any shortage of works on paper, but more likely because anybody who was fortunate to get their hands on one—friends, family, colleagues, bidders at benefit auditions—has guarded it zealously.
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