Judith Murray (b. 1941, New York) is an abstract painter who has created a trademark language that is deeply expressive. Active in New York since the 1970s, Murray belongs to a leading generation of women artists whose work is receiving renewed critical attention.
Oil paintings from early in her career featured stark and incisive forms in red, white, yellow, and black. The vertical bar on the right-hand edge of the canvas that first appeared in those paintings has become a permanent element in all her work, in effect anchoring the compositions. Over the years, she has remained faithful to the use of only red, white, yellow, and black, combining them to produce a seemingly infinite variety of hues. The vertical bar and the discipline of restricting her palette has given a kind of subliminal stability to her work. Most recently, Murray has been painting on large canvases that can reach up to eight by nine feet, juxtaposing densely layered, gestural, almost sculptural brushstrokes made with palette knives, brushes, and rags.
Raised in Miami, Murray moved to New York in 1958 to study at Pratt Institute under the painter Walter Tandy Murch. In 1964, she was selected to be an artist-in-residence with the United States Information Agency in Poland, where she pursued a brief stint in printmaking before returning to New York to begin her career in painting. Murray received early recognition when the legendary dealer Betty Parsons—known for championing Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman—gave her a solo show at Parsons-Truman Gallery in 1976. Two years later, curator Alanna Heiss, a pioneer in the alternative space movement, invited Murray to mount a solo show at The Clocktower, one of New York’s foremost experimental art spaces. Murray later participated in various exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now known as MoMA PS1), the 1979 Whitney Biennial, as well as more than thirty group museum exhibitions. In 1982 she had a solo show at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas.
In 2025, Murray’s oil paintings and graphite drawings were showcased in the exhibition Judith Murray: Paradise Paradox at 447 Space in New York at the invitation of artists Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko. The exhibition was accompanied by a hardcover book of the same name documenting her work from the mid-1970s until the present. It is available in-store at MoMA PS1’s Artbook Bookstore and online at www.artbookstores.com.
Murray is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Painting; a Guggenheim Fellowship; and National Endowment for the Arts Award. Murray was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2009. Her work is in numerous notable public and private collections, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Contemporary Museum, Hawaii; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; New York Public Library; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; United States Embassy, Mumbai; and Royal Family of Abu Dhabi.
Judith Murray lives and works in SoHo in New York City.
