Back on Earth

Elizabeth Murray became known for her brightly colored and shaped canvases in late 1970s New York. Her vibrant and energetic visual language playfully challenged the formal conventions of painting—such as the idea that the canvas must be rectangular. Back on Earth is composed of two grandly scaled canvases—one geometric (blue), the other biomorphic (green)—that are inextricably linked by the artist’s use of color and rambunctious imagery. The animated, squid-like black table—a recurring motif in Murray’s paintings—here further confounds the relationship between figure and ground.