Robert Gray Murray (born March 2, 1936) is considered by some to be Canada's foremost abstract sculptor. He also has been called the most important sculptor of his generation worldwide. His large outdoor works are said to resemble the abstract stabile style of Alexander Calder, that is, the self-supporting, static, abstract sculptures, dubbed "stabiles" by Jean Arp in 1932 to differentiate them from Calder's mobiles. Murray focused on "trying to get sculpture back to its essential form", he has said. His work is like colour-field abstraction.

Biography

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, he has lived in the United States since 1960. He began his career as a painter, studying at the Regina College School of Art (1956-1956). In 1957 he worked at the city planning office in Saskatoon and it commissioned a fountain sculpture from him: it was his first sculpture. He went to study at the Allende Institute, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (1958-1959), then worked at Saskatoon Technical Collegiate before attending an Emma Lake Artist's Workshop in 1959 with Barnett Newman with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. Newman looked at his paintings and asked "Have you ever thought of sculpture?" He moved to New York City in 1960 on a Canada Council grant, and although he had never studied sculpture in the formal sense, began to produce modernist, elegant, brightly colored welded-metal constructions. Murray's works often recall natural themes through shape, color, and of course, name; other works are named after people, places, or things in North America though of course, as Murray said:"'With abstract art the piece is itself and what happens within the piece is the subject of the piece'." Murray's earliest sheet-metal sculptures were large-scale upright columnar configurations that were made by cutting and bending steel plates to form angles and corners. They were coloured with industrial finishes and created with the aid of fabricators. In 1974, Murray's sculptures became more freely formed than before, with more crenellated surfaces. Murray had a new concern with highly fluid curves that combined complexity of form with subtler colour. His ambition was to incorporate colour as a part of the metal. Murray usually works to an architectural scale in his sculptures; they have no content but form. They can be viewed as belonging to a past aesthetic - Modernism - and lacking in contemporary relevance. But a reviewer of a recent show, Models, Paintings and Sculpture, much of it completed in the last three years, at Studio 21 Fine Art, Halifax, wrote that, when well executed, a Modernist like Murray can still make objects that achieve a "clarity and sureness that is somehow comforting".

Work in Collections

United States

Alaska California Delaware District of Columbia Georgia Illinois Maine Massachusetts and Drawing after Quinnipiac, Seven Views, 1975, University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Michigan Minnesota Nebraska New Jersey New York Ohio Pennsylvania Wisconsin

International

Canada

Alberta British Columbia Ontario New Brunswick Saskatchewan

Not Located