Jesse Murry: Lisa Yuskavage and Jarrett Earnest

We discover the world of an incredible artist JESSE MURRY who passed away in 1993 leaving an extraordinary legacy of artwork, poetry and writing. Fusing the Romantic painting tradition of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner with the quality of mind and imagination of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Murry uniquely sought to create a “landscape” within the fiction of painting that could be “more than a place to dwell but a suitable space for dreams.”

We meet two special guests this week to remember Murry’s artwork and to explore his extraordinary thinking - the artists #LisaYuskavage @LisaYuskavageStudio and @JarrettEarnest - who together have united to curate an extraordinary new exhibition titled ‘Jesse Murry: Rising’, curated by Lisa Yuskavage and Jarrett Earnest, at #DavidZwirner’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York.

Painter and poet #JesseMurry (1948–1993) identified three significant approaches to landscape—'poetic,' 'dramatic,' and 'visionary,' which he aimed to synthesize into abstract paintings. Born in North Carolina, Jesse Murry studied art and philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College before moving to New York City in 1979. His essays on artists including Hans Hofmann and Howard Hodgkin appeared in a range of publications, including Arts Magazine. After two years of teaching art history and exhibiting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Murry enrolled in the Yale School of Art at the age of thirty-six. 

‘Jesse Murry: Rising’ brings together paintings from the last five years of the artist's life. This work—made while confronting his impending mortality from AIDS-related illness—testifies to Murry's lifelong belief in the capacity of painting to hold the complexity of human meaning, at the meeting of a material fact and a location within the mind. Exhibition runs from 17 SEPTEMBER – 23 OCTOBER 2021. Learn more: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2021/more-life/jesse-murry

Forthcoming on September 28, 2021, and titled after a paper the artist wrote while at Yale, Painting Is a Supreme Fiction is an unprecedented collection of Murry’s writings. Edited and with an introduction by Jarrett Earnest and a foreword by Hilton Als, the book also includes transcriptions of two of the artist’s notebooks, in which the spatialization of the words across the page approaches the condition of thought. We strongly recommend buying this special book!!!

Thank you Lisa, Jarrett and the team at @DavidZwirner. #JesseMurry 

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