Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Catherine Murphy at Lennon, Weinberg

Catherine Murphy at Lennon, Weinberg
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Faye Hirsch

Catherine Murphy's recent show at Lennon, Weinberg's new two-floor Chelsea space included eight oil paintings and five large graphite drawings completed between 2002 and 2004. Veteran realist Murphy casts a cool eye on the mundane details of her life, in the process exposing the tricks and tropes of image-making. As always, she addresses the nature of perception, especially the experience of looking at art.

A diptych, Tracks (2003), consists of, above, a blue sky unmarked but for the fading streams of a jet, and, below, some turf tipped up parallel to the viewer, with every blade of grass visible alongside the gravel in a pair of tire tracks. The junction is abrupt, creating extremes of proximity and distance that extinguish the classic formulas of landscape--though together the panels seem to constitute the simplest sort of horizon. The Back of Her Head (2004), a close-up rear view of a girl's head tied in a blue-checkered kerchief, presents a paradox in which the presumably grand sight transfixing the girl is almost entirely blocked, except for bits of sky with scudding clouds. The view is ample as is, however, with a beautifully rendered light filtering through the gridded cloth or lying in a patch on the girl's neck.

There was morphological resonance to be had in Murphy's paintings of an earthen hole in a snow-covered lawn (a subject she has visited before) and of Harry's Nipple (2003; turns out "Harry" is her husband) seen through another hole, this time in a T-shirt. Here, a few gray hairs around the nipple render an eloquent testimony (though there is something very funny, too, about this absurd view). The show-stopping still life 11 lbs. (2003), a virtuosic drawing that depicts the top of a cardboard box, its flaps neatly tucked, seems to pivot, emotionally, on the blank black square at the center, the hole where the flaps don't quite meet, an emblem of something, like death, off limits to understanding. Here Murphy acknowledges her debt to John Frederick Peto and a trompe-l'oeil strain in American still-life painting.

In fact, much of Murphy's project is a meditation on mortality, with two painted self-portraits especially tough in this regard. One shows a photograph of the smiling artist in her youth; pinned to the wall, the photo has come unfastened and is dangling by a corner (Slipped Self, 2004). Thus unmoored, it reveals the patch it protected for so long, as the fading of the rest of the old-fashioned fern-patterned wallpaper painfully attests. The other self-portrait is a head-and-shoulders view of the artist against an empty background, apparently reflected in a mirror (Face Shapes, 2002). Three geometric forms--a rectangle, an oval and a cut-off, inverted triangle--are painted on the surface of the mirror in coarse, fecal-brown strokes. In this single, unlovely work, Murphy's concerns come together brilliantly. Here, in shorthand, are the essentials of portraiture, inscribed on the transparent picture plane. But the forms are also superimposed over the lined and sagging visage of the artist as a middle-aged woman. Eyes wide open and staring straight out, she is unsparing.

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