Published by Skira Rizzoli in association with Peter Freeman, Inc.
Catherine Murphy has been celebrated as a representational painter of
exceptional precision, and this, her first monograph, Catherine
Murphy, surveys her complete work, which unites American Minimalism and
American naturalist painting. Murphy has evolved a style that combines
obsessive authenticity with Minimalist rigor. From the shaded lawns of
the New Jersey suburbs to the Massachusetts woods, from childhood
interiors to self-portraits and detailed images of buttons and dust,
carpeted stairs, or a stuccoed ceiling, Murphy always paints and draws
from life, often the domestic and quotidian. John Yau notes in his
introduction that, "her attachment to the commonplace is not just
amatter of convenience, of painting and drawing what she can see from
her window or inside herapartment. In her choice of subjects--and I am
speaking here of Murphy's entire career, which stretches across five
decades--the artist has made a conscious decision to stay true to both
what she could observe and to her own working-class background, and the
aesthetic choices that people of that milieuare constantly making, from
illustrated calendars and inexpensive objets d'art to wallpaper
andrefrigerator magnets."
