Judith Murray: Paradise Paradox
by Rachel Federman
ARTSEEN | APRIL, 2025
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447 SPACE | FEBRUARY 28 - APRIL 11, 2025 | NEW YORK
Installation view: Judith Murray: Paradise Paradox, 447 Space, New York, 2025. Courtesy 447 Space.
Judith Murray is both the curator and the subject of an excellent survey at 447 Space, an expansive non-profit exhibition space founded by the artists Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko in their former studio in Chelsea. With eleven paintings and twenty-five graphite drawings created between 1980 and 2025, Paradise Paradox offers an unprecedented opportunity to get to know this consummate New York painter.
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Murray established herself in New York in 1958, after spending her childhood and adolescence in the hothouse environment of Miami Beach. She attended Pratt, where she was mentored by the venerable and unclassifiable Walter Murch. Her first studio on Pearl Street afforded her a view of the East River—an impoverished, but welcomed, substitute for the ocean she loves. She received her first significant solo exhibition at the Parsons-Truman Gallery, an auxiliary of the Betty Parsons Gallery, in 1976. Like many of the artists most closely associated with Parsons, Murray is an abstract painter, and has worked in hard-edge and gestural styles throughout her career.
Judith Murray, Red Wing, 1980. Oil on canvas, 52 x 57 inches. Courtesy 447 Space.
The exhibition’s title, Paradise Paradox (also the title of a 1981 painting, not included), reverberates in Murray’s choices. At first glance, the show seems to comprise two unrelated bodies of work, one consisting of precisely painted forms in cadmium red, yellow ochre, and white, on matte black grounds; the second of lush, gestural canvases, built of layer upon layer of shimmering color, scumbled and glazed. The only feature they appear to share is a vertical bar at the right edge of the canvas (Murray has been utilizing this compositional device since the 1970s). But the presumed chromatic range of the later, more painterly canvases, is a feint. They originate in the same four-color palette as the earlier works. Murray finds extraordinary range and freedom in this self-imposed restriction.
A third similarity lies beneath the surface. The resolutely flat Red Wing (1980) required numerous layers of black oil paint, each painstakingly applied over time, to achieve its uniform matte appearance. Drawing on the principles of Zen Buddhism, she achieved the crisp edges of her fluid lines and forms without the use of tape. Like the surface on which they sit, their lightness is an effect engendered by labor and concentration: A paradise born of a paradox.
Judith Murray, Second Chance, 2025. Oil on linen, 54 x 96 inches. Courtesy 447 Space.
Toward the start of the exhibition, Red Wing, the earliest painting, hangs beside Second Chance (2025), the latest. Thematically, if not formally, they are a natural pair. It is not the most layered work in the gallery, but Second Chance amply demonstrates Murray’s shift to textured, gestural abstraction. Brushstrokes manifest the movement that was previously implicit in her painted forms. White paint, applied in dynamic strokes with brushes and palette knives, sits on the surface. Edges are pronounced enough at times to cast shadows. Despite their evident materiality, these staccato strokes appear ready to take flight. The diffuse, multi-layered ground beneath them resembles nothing so much as a Florida sunset after a storm. (Until last year, Murray and her husband, the artist Robert Yasuda, maintained a winter studio in Key West). Second Chance surfaces the hidden layers of Red Wing and dissolves its elegant, aerodynamic forms. Nevertheless, it retains its predecessor’s sense of lightness.
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Judith Murray, 3 Pm, 2006. Graphite on arches paper, 22 1/2 x 30 inches. Courtesy 447 Space.
The formal differences between Red Wing and Second Chance—and the decades between them—are bridged by a series of graphite drawings installed nearby. These are not studies for paintings, but are rather improvisations after them. Murray builds her drawings through meticulous, repetitive pencil strokes—a form of moving meditation. Together with Messengers (1983-84), an imposing oil triptych installed against the back wall of the gallery, they help to illuminate the trajectory of Murray’s painting practice between 1980 and today. In Messengers, forms turn and twist in space; colors blend, reflect, and shade; visible brushstrokes surface; paint becomes matter. Each of the three panels bears Murray’s signature right-edge bar. Because they are installed with edges flush, the bars resemble lines in a musical composition.
Installation view: Judith Murray: Paradise Paradox, 447 Space, New York, 2025. Courtesy 4447 Space.
Murray begins each painting and drawing by delineating the right-edge bar. The bar may expand or contract as the painting develops, but it is a constant. She says it allows her to designate the rest of the canvas as her arena, though she works the bar as well. Once in the Morning (2014) is a two-panel painting that feels like squinting at a dappled patch of sunlight on a fluid surface. Its reflective silver bar practically disintegrates in your field of vision. I find that even when a bar is more assertive, it has the effect of performing peripheral vision. It is like the phrase, “Out of the corner of my eye.” In this way, Murray’s paintings capture the drama of an embodied beholder moving through space. It is not only the water, the birds, the sunlight, that changes. We do, as well.
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Paradise Paradox is a playground of visual and proprioceptive sensation. But it also presents its visitors with a challenge. It asks us to look beyond mere stylistic difference, to wade deeper into the undercurrent of a single artist’s practice. Now in the sixth decade of her career, Murray is at the peak of her powers. And she is still evolving.
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Rachel Federman, PhD, is a writer and curator who previously worked at SFMOMA and the Morgan Library & Museum. She has curated exhibitions of Bruce Conner, Maurice Sendak, Rick Barton, Bridget Riley, and Helène Aylon, among others. She is currently writing a biography of Betty Parsons.