"I paint about the things that surround me," Murray said, "things that I pick up and handle every day. That’s what art is. Art is an epiphany in a coffee cup." Just such a coffee cup, with its contents spilling forth, appears in the appropriately entitled Yikes. Standing out from the wall in relief, the ordinariness of this familiar situation is dramatized by the monumental size of the seemingly broken canvases that resist fitting back together again. Murray said that she found the process of splintering the conventional picture plane "so psychologically satisfying because I finally realized the meaning of shattering and of putting an image inside the shattered parts that would make them whole again."
Elizabeth Murray Yikes January-February 1982
- Medium
- Oil on canvas, two panels
- Dimensions
- Overall 9' 7" x 9' 5 1/2" (292.1 x 288.3 cm)
- Credit
- Gift of Douglas S. Cramer Foundation
- Object number
- 352.1997.a-b
- Copyright
- © 2023 Estate of Elizabeth Murray / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture
- Elizabeth Murray has 86 works online.
- There are 2,410 paintings online.
Installation views
We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.
In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.
If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].
If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).
MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.
If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].
This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].