"Uncannily real"
鈥淯ncannily real鈥�
April 6, 2017
Catherine Murphy
Oil painter Catherine Murphy is renowned for her meticulously composed, intensively
detailed, often larger-than-life depictions of everyday objects and scenes, from garden
hoses to pie crusts to trees. Her style has been described as "uncannily realistic,"
fostering deeply immersive experiences鈥攆or her, in the years it may take to complete
each painting, and for viewers, in engaging with hyper-detailed images that seem to
make time stand still.
Murphy will deliver this year's Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture on Thursday, April
13, at 6 p.m. at Filene Hall. The talk is free and open to the public. Also a creator
of drawings, Murphy has four drawings in the Graphite Vision exhibition at Skidmore's
Schick Art Gallery through April 23.
Murphy's extensive schedule of solo and group exhibitions starting in the 1970s has
ranged from New York City's Sargent's Daughters to the Armory, from Houston's Texas
Gallery to Chicago's J. Rosenthal Fine Arts to Los Angeles's Daniel Weinberg Gallery,
and from Bogota to Athens to Tokyo. Her works are in some 30 major collections, including
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Milwaukee
Art Museum, the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, and the National Portrait Gallery.
Her work has been covered regularly by publications from Artnews and Art in America to the New York Times and New Yorker.
She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and then Pratt Institute,
where she earned a BFA in 1967.
A recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1979 and 1989, she also won
received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, a Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in 2013, and
scores of other honors. She was a senior critic at Yale University's Graduate School
of Art for 22 years and is now the Tepper Family Professor at Rutgers's Mason Gross
School of the Arts.
Endowed by the late Susan Rabinowitz Malloy '45, a Skidmore art major and lifelong
artist, the lecture series brings distinguished contemporary artists to campus each
year.
