“Uncannily real”

April 6, 2017

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—for 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.