Chris Murray Buildingscapes November 2 - 30, 2005 reception Wed., November 2 6-8pm For more than twenty years, Chris Murray (b.1960) has been making large-scale paintings on paper, reinterpreting New York City's urban landscape. In reviewing his last show at KS ART, Ken Johnson writes, "With rulers, pencils, and paint and a focus driven partly by autism, Mr. Murray makes detailed, highly ordered yet unfussily immediate pictures of Manhattan buildings looming over busily trafficked streets." Created with obsessive, fastidious draughtsmanship, Murray's pictures also deploy impossible perspectives in ultra-flattened spaces as the artist animates official landmarks such as the Empire State Building, the University Club, Macy's, and the Jewish Museum.
Murray transforms mundane, post-card style images gleaned from photographs in books with his own distinctive process and vision. Like the city, the works themselves are constructed out of a grid, consisting of numerous sheets of paper to which he glues extensions as space requires. The works typically require months of countless re-workings to complete, which wrinkles the paper and distresses the paint, giving the results an almost sculptural presence and a feeling of having been lived in. Buildingscapes is Chris Murray's third one-person exhibition at KS ART. Murray, a true outsider, whose authentic vision and method characterized by obsessive repetition now fits interestingly within recent trends in new contemporary art.
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