Artist, Elizabeth Murray: The title of the work is Dis Pair, which is sort of a play on a pair of shoes, and “Dis Pair” is like "the pair" with a Brooklyn accent. It's part of a series of paintings of shoes that I did over a period of four or five years.
Curator, Mia Matthias: Elizabeth Murray talks about how she was veering away from illusion, actually, in a lot of her earlier works. But in Dis Pair, there are holes where you might think it's a depiction of a hole, and then elsewhere, she's created that through shading. So this feels like it’s her leaning into optical illusion.
Dis Pair is a really great example of Murray's use of color, because she began the color palette in a completely different place from where it ended.
Elizabeth Murray: I started it red. If you go up closely to it, you can see, like, red drips and the remnants of the red. Somehow that didn't work, the red. So I let the red dry and started to put layers of blue over it.
Mia Matthias: The blue is a different blue because she used the red as a foundation. She leaves these hints at the path she took to get to the final product, and it is as entrancing as it is because she took that meandering path to get to this final color palette. That's part of what I admire about her is her ability to follow her intuition. She would keep transforming it until she had achieved that magic moment.