Carnegie Museum of Art opens fall exhibition 'Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves'

The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, March 29, 2024


Carnegie Museum of Art opens fall exhibition 'Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves'
Jessi Reaves, Idol of the Hares, 2014. Oak, polyurethane foam, silk, cotton, aluminum, and ink, 38 × 28 × 48 inches. Collection Sam and Erin Falls, Los Angeles, California.



PITTSBURGH, PA.- Carnegie Museum of Art announces Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves, on view through January 9, 2022. Bringing together the work of Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) and Jessi Reaves (b. 1986), this traveling exhibition highlights how both artists—practicing generations apart—have critically engaged with the decorative, the domestic, and the bodily.

Taking the form of two surveys and a two-person exhibition, Wild Life travels to Pittsburgh from Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) where it debuted in January 2021. Organized by Rebecca Matalon, CAMH Curator, the show presents Murray’s paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, chronicling the artist’s exploration of the domestic sphere through surrealism, abstraction, and compositional experimentation, alongside a selection of Reaves’s sculptural assemblages from the last seven years. The presentation includes two additional paintings by Murray and four additional sculptures by Reaves from Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection.

While forty-six years separate the births of Elizabeth Murray and Jessi Reaves, there are intriguing connections in their work that reveal Murray’s lasting influence and historically contextualizes Reaves. Like Murray, Reaves’s work avoids easy categorization, instead offering nuanced and often ambiguous three-dimensional conceptions of the body and the home, wherein both are continuously coming together and falling apart. In their questioning of so-called “good taste,” Murray and Reaves elevate and emphasize the aesthetic value of the “detail”—historically associated with the ornamental, the domestic, and the everyday, and thus the feminine.




“We are thrilled to present Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessie Reaves at Carnegie Museum of Art. This important exhibition presents a cross-generational dialogue between two admired and unconventional artists, whose individual practices we see in an entirely new light thanks to curator Rebecca Matalon," says Eric Crosby, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art. “Carnegie Museum of Art has collected works by both artists over time as a result of their participation in past Carnegie Internationals. This imaginative exhibition will allow our visitors to discover new connections between the artists and deepen their enjoyment of contemporary painting and sculpture.”

Murray is best known for her monumental, fractured canvases depicting cartoonish, domestic scenes and still lifes. Her earliest works from the late 1960s reflect the influences of surrealism and pop, as well as the work of peers now associated with the Hairy Who and Bay Area Funk movements. Murray then turned to a reduced visual language of gestural and geometric abstraction. However, she never entirely abandoned representational imagery, nor the subject of the domestic sphere, as her paintings from the early 1970s attest. Over time, Murray’s shapes expanded beyond the surface of her compositions to form the frame. In 1980, the canvases—now massive in scale—cracked open into multi-paneled paintings depicting splintering cups, kitchen tables, and fragmented body parts, eventually leading to Murray’s signature, monumental constructions of overlapping and interpenetrating shaped canvases.

Despite the significant critical reception Murray received during her lifetime, her work remains an outlier of sorts, resisting affiliation with a singular historical movement or style. Additionally, her influence on recent generations of artists, as well as her significant impact on broader conversations regarding the daily and domestic, remain under-examined.

Reaves’s eccentric, garish, and surreal sculptures made of ripped, recombined, and reupholstered amalgamations of couches and chairs—often by noted modernist designers such as Marcel Breuer and Isamu Noguchi—extend Murray’s own cartoonish plays into three dimensions. Sumptuous and grotesque in equal measure, Reaves’s work both literally and figuratively performs a process of undoing, a laying bare, or laying to waste, of the modernist ideal of form following function. Her often discomfiting assemblages occupy a space between sculpture and furniture, as they puzzle out and defy a history in which ornament (or craft)—traditionally associated, and pejoratively so, with “women’s work”—and modernist design are assumed irreconcilable. Reaves, like Murray, irreverently plays with color and form, high and low cultural references, and notions of masculinity and femininity.

Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves is accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalogue, co-published by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Dancing Foxes Press. The illustrated publication features an essay by Matalon, a conversation between Reaves and writer and musician Johanna Fateman, as well as a reprinted conversation between Murray and editor and filmmaker Kate Horsfield, originally published in a 1986 issue of Profile magazine.










Today's News

September 9, 2021

Toomey & Co. Auctioneers to hold 'Fine Art + Furniture & Decorative Arts' sale

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, acquires Souls Grown Deep Foundation works

Flashpoint US statue of Confederate general removed in Richmond

San Francisco gets its own Institute of Contemporary Art

Martos Gallery opens "The Collective: Chosen Family"

Avery Singer presents two new series of large-scale paintings at Hauser & Wirth

Alberto Vilar, arts patron convicted of fraud, dies at 80

Unseen Photo Fair 2021: Spectacular edition will be held from September 17-19

Phillips to host 'Reframing Beauty: A Private Seattle Collection'

Exhibition at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada explores computer-generated imagery practices

Exhibition brings together a fresh mix of emerging voices from the international scene

David Diao's first solo exhibition in the UK opens at Gazelli Art House

Megan Rooney's first solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac opens in London

Solo presentation of works by artist Gracie DeVito opens at The New York Studio School

Halloween's Jamie Lee Curtis: 'I hate horror movies'

Galerie Karsten Greve opens an exhibition featuring a selection of fifteen canvases by Qiu Shihua

Carnegie Museum of Art opens fall exhibition 'Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves'

Exhibition of eight new paintings by Amie Cunat opens at Dinner Gallery

BC McMullen Museum opens first major US exhibition on Cuban modernist painter Mariano Rodríguez

BP Portrait Award winner Richard Twose mines his incredible life story in new show

Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross exhibits works by artist and Civil Rights activist Elizabeth Catlett

Brooklyn community mourns Michael K. Williams: 'He never stayed away'

Igor Oistrakh, Soviet-era violinist (and a son of one), dies at 90

A pandemic, then a hurricane, brings New Orleans musicians 'to their knees'

Frank conversations about making a living in dance

Tips for buying a used home. Do not be fooled!

Free vs Paid VPNs. Which Is Better for Streaming Netflix in 2021

The Best Canadian Casinos 2021

WHY HIRE A WEB DESIGN SERVICE COMPANY?




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful