Catherine Murphy

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 . ”