David Zwirner

Jesse Murry

David Zwirner is pleased to present Jesse Murry: Rising, curated by Lisa Yuskavage and Jarrett Earnest, opening September 17, 2021 at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York.

Painter and poet Jesse Murry (1948–1993) identified three significant approaches to landscape —“poetic,” “dramatic,” and “visionary,” which he aimed to synthesize into abstract paintings. Built of subtly shifting color dynamics, his canvases became “places summoned by the memory through the imagination; where the elements of WEATHER are protagonists that act out moods open to many readings; where the light & space have a spiritual import.” To this end, the horizon was both his central image and guiding ideal, as the moment where near and far, inside and outside, self and other could be negotiated and reconciled. 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.”

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.

Jesse Murry, 1991 (detail). Photo by Richard Constable

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’s Sarah Lawrence student ID

Installation view, Jesse Murry: Rising, David Zwirner, New York, 2021

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.”

Jesse Murry

Untitled, 1991

Oil and wax on canvas

48 1/2 x 47 3/4 inches (123.2 x 121.3 cm)

“If there is a general theme or idea concerning my work, beyond the delight in color or form, it is to create a space in which the viewer can be as creative in looking as I am when I am painting. There is plenty of space for the viewer to actively participate with his imagination, but initially he is grabbed by color and its magical capacity to shape a world.”

—Jesse Murry, in a statement accompanying his exhibition at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1984

“I met Jesse at my Yale interview.… He was the most erudite person I ever met. He was physically grand: tall, with a big belly, and very dominant. He went to Yale graduate school in his late thirties to become a painter.… He would come to my studio, and what he said about my work stays with me to this day.”

—Lisa Yuskavage, “Muse”, 2011. Read the full text here.

Jesse Murry

In Ryder's Eye, 1987

Oil and wax on linen

14 1/4 x 18 1/2 inches (36.2 x 47 cm)

Built of subtly shifting color dynamics, Murry’s canvases became “places summoned by the memory through the imagination; where the elements of WEATHER are protagonists that act out moods open to many readings; where the light & space have a spiritual import.” The horizon was both his central image and guiding ideal, as the moment where near and far, inside and outside, self and other could be negotiated and reconciled.

Installation view, Jesse Murry: Rising, David Zwirner, New York, 2021

Jesse Murry

Deluge – After Turner, c. 1990 - 1991

Oil and wax on linen

30 3/4 x 31 inches (78.1 x 78.7 cm)

All my life
has been a life of crossing
from the racial barriers
imposed by the tragic limitations of history
to the transcendental urge
to move beyond those limitations.

What has prompted this effort toward humanity
is a necessary belief in art’s saving powers of address.
This is the effort to restore imaginative possibility
along the line of the horizon,
through the space and form of landscape
as the mind recaptures its capacity to create
and the soul may regain its freedom.

—Jesse Murry, excerpt from “From Notes on Landscape,” 1987

Jesse Murry

Untitled, 1992

Oil and wax on canvas

20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm)

View the exhibition at 533 West 19th Street

An introduction to a panel discussion on “expressionism” in contemporary art moderated by Jesse Murry, November 7 1980. Participants included Natalie Edgar, Joseph S. Lewis III, Masami Masuda, Ana Mendieta, Peter Passuntino, Nancy Spero, and Philip Wofford. Excerpted is an exchange with Ana Mendieta about space, site, and the body, which intersect with his own later work on landscape. Credit: “Expressionism: 1980” (panel discussion, New York City, November 7, 1980), Artists Talk on Art records, c. 1974–2018, audio recording, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Image: Jesse Murry outside of 431 Broome Street, NYC, 1979. Photo by Beverly D'Andrea

Jesse Murry

Untitled (Rising/Abyss Study), 1992

Oil and wax on canvas

20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm)

In 1987, one year after receiving his Yale MFA, Murry held his first solo exhibition in New York at Sharpe Gallery. In 1983, he was awarded the Mellon Individual Project Grant, and in 1988, the Pollock-Krasner Grant for his work.

A solo exhibition, Jesse Murry: Radical Solitude, was presented at Tibor de Nagy gallery, New York, in 2019.

Installation view, Jesse Murry: Radical Solitude, Tibor de Nagy, New York, 2019

“Murry’s works are not large in scale, but they promote big dreams: his terrain is the unfettered mind and eye. He draws you in with his liquid awareness of how paint works on canvas, and how color and form can and should be handled delicately, and with respect.”

—Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 2020

Jesse Murry

Rising, 1992

Oil and beeswax on canvas

20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm)
Framed: 25 1/4 x 25 1/4 inches (64.1 x 64.1 cm)

Inquire about Works by Jesse Murry

Installation view, Jesse Murry: Rising, David Zwirner, New York, 2021

“Painting and poetry are … the only weapons I have to combat the insanity of the world and the only means I have of acquiring a spiritual grip on the chaotic nature of experience.”

—Jesse Murry, c. 1987

Jesse Murry, Yale, 1986

Cover of the book Painting is a Supreme Fiction by 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.

Poem by and photograph of Jesse Murry in Lisa Yuskavage's studio, New York, 2011. Photo by Paola Ferrario

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