Deborah Hanson Murphy

Born in Stockton, CA in 1931, Deborah Hanson Murphy studied at Stanford and the Art Students League in New York and then eventually settled down in Paris where she spent the majority of her life as a serious artist. She began painting what she would call her “Variations” (still lives) around 1974, which she continued until her death in 2018. In these paintings, lean and airy compositions revolve around a seemingly stable lexicon of elements (shells, leaves, etc) which are articulated along an implied horizon in empty monochromatic fields of sienna, gray, light mauve or beige. While the structure remains consistent throughout her work, the paintings become increasingly rarified, reductive and abstracted as she progresses. Her approach to painting was methodical and obsessive; she would often revisit a single work up to ten times over a decade, notating the year on the back each time she did so. However, anything but obsessive or ambivalent, her imagery ultimately radiates an uncanny calm. For all their apparent classicism, her rigorous and meditative pictures feel as fresh and contemporary as anything being made today.