Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/03/2021 - 01/09/2022
12:00 am
Location
Carnegie Museum Of Art
Categories
This exhibition brings together the work of Elizabeth Murray (1940—2007) and New York-based sculptor Jessi Reaves (b. 1986). Although Murray and Reaves are generations apart, the exhibition highlights each artist’s simultaneously lyrical, playful and rigorous engagement with the decorative, domestic and bodily.
Murray is best known for her monumental, fractured canvases depicting cartoonish, domestic scenes and still lifes. 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.
Reaves’s eccentric, garish, and surreal sculptures made of ripped, recombined, and reupholstered amalgamations of couches and chairs — often by noted modernist designers — 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.
Works by Murray spanning the 1960s to the 2000s are presented alongside a selection of Reaves’s sculptural assemblages of the last seven years, including her signature ottomans. In their raucous questioning of so-called “good taste,” Murray and Reaves each elevate and emphasize the aesthetic value of the “detail” — historically associated with the ornamental, domestic, and everyday, and thus the feminine — only to violently unsettle and explode such “bad objects.”
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