A delirious New York: Elizabeth Murray and Emily Furr

Elizabeth Murray’s “Broken Dreams,” 1970 © 2025 The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York / Brussels, and Emily Furr’s “Automatic Architecture,” 2025 / Courtesy the artist and Sargent’s Daughter, New York.

By JASON ANDREW July 8, 2025

In 1996, as a resident artist at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, Elizabeth Murray mounted a small exhibition of recent drawings. In a coinciding lecture, details of which were recorded in the local paper, Murray shared two revelatory moments from her early career: first, that a Cezanne still-life taught her that dead painters could be as passionate and relevant as a Janis Joplin record, and second that married, pregnant and miserable, she took revenge on an icon viewable from her apartment, The Empire State Building, cracking it in half and framing it with a baby blanket border. (1)

This painting, Murray titled “Broken Dreams” (1970), came into sharp focus when I visited Emily Furr’s exhibition “Delirious New York” which recently closed at Sargent’s Daughters in Tribeca. There is a shared focus on symbolic architecture and a similar psychological charge between Emily Furr’s paintings of the Empire State Building and a little-known series of the same subject by Elizabeth Murray.

Elizabeth Murray, “Night Empire,” 1967-68, oil on canvas, 51 ½ x 48 ½ in (130.8 x 123.2 cm) © 2025 The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York / Brussels.

Murray arrived in New York City in the summer of 1967 by way of Mills College and a two-year teaching stint at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen University) in Buffalo, NY. In Buffalo, she experimented with soft-sculpture inspired by Claes Oldenburg—his playful distortions of everyday forms inspired her to treat the creative process not as flat surface but as a pliable, object-like structure. When she arrived in New York City, she rented a loft at 211 West 28^th Street, and in an act that would chart the course of her five-decade career, Murray looked out her front door, or in this case her window, for raw inspiration. 

Emily Furr, “Airship Spire,” 2025, oil on linen, 36 x 48 in (91.5 x 122 cm). Courtesy the artist and Sargent’s Daughter, New York

Furr has lived in New York for the last twenty-four years, arriving shortly after the city was recovering from the attacks of September 11, 2001. Across her major bodies of work, she has transformed signifiers of masculinity, violence, and power into wry visual puns and subversive scenes that have the crispness of a Charles Sheeler and emotional flare of a Elsie Driggs. For her fifth solo show at Sargent’s Daughters, Furr cites the Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas as inspiration. Specifically, it’s his manifesto-like rant on 20^th Century urbanism published as a seminal work titled “Delirious New York” (1978). With her signature precisionist style, Furr addresses Koolass’s analysis of Manhattan’s urban design and further interrogates its logic. 

Elizabeth Murray, “O-O-O- ur’ll Never Get to Heaven,” 1969, oil on canvas, 48 ¼ x 51 1/8 in (122.6 x 129.8 cm) © 2025 The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York / Brussels.

For Murray, Manhattan’s architecture is also ripe for distortion as seen in the “Empire Series” (1967-1970), of which only a handful are known to still exist. The series was first exhibited in September 1970 in the student lounge at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ. The works were described to include works in oil, Liquitex, plaster, ink, plastics, and watercolor. (2) As Roberta Smith described the series in Murray’s 1987 monograph, these paintings “transport the building to rural settings and surround it with wildlife, starry nights, rolling hills, and innocent little steam engines. The smooth, fastidious surface and tight rendering of these paintings seem completely alien to Murray’s usual robust physicality […] covert signs of things to come.” (3)

 (L to R: Elizabeth Murray, “Save a Life,” 1969, India ink on shaped paper with collage, 26 x 18 in (66 x 45.7 cm) © 2025 The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York / Brussels, and Emily Furr, “The Moon as Wrecking Ball,” 2025, collage and India ink on paper, 12 x 9 in (30.5 x 23 cm). Courtesy the artist and Sargent’s Daughter and Nicholas Knight Photography

In a striking coincidence, sixteen works (including paintings and collage) were also featured in Furr’s exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters. Her structures—often futuristic, sleek, and pliable—create a visual language that balances rigidity and sensuality. In “The City of the Captive Globe,” Furr paints a pale moon trolling through a night-lit labyrinth-like city—the corporeality of the painted sphere in contrast with the edge-slanted buildings. Through Furr’s crisp geometric clarity and a play on the modern still-life, she infers a kind-of feminine strength and vulnerability.

Like much of the artworld, Furr was unaware of the existence of Murray’s “Empire Series.” Yet the resonance lies not in direct influence but in a shared translation of internal states into constructed, anthropomorphic spaces. Both artists abstract the building’s silhouette, using it not simply as a skyline icon but as a vessel of personal, cultural, and erotic energy. Furr sharpens its phallic presence with surrealist precision, while Murray’s interpretations fracture and soften it into animated, feminine-coded forms. For each artist, the architectural becomes a stand-in for the psychological: Murray’s canvases evoke the elasticity of thought and emotion, while Furr’s offer compression suggesting internal pressure and containment.

For Murray and Furr, the Empire State Building is a proxy for desire, power, and transformation. Their work is caught between monumentality and vulnerability, abstraction and embodiment. For Murray, her series was transformative yet short-lived. For Furr, we can expect her work will continue to be dynamically relevant to our ever-changing and at times isolating condition.

Installation view, Emily Furr “Delirious New York,” Sargent’s Daughters, New York. Photo Nicholas Knight Photography

Emily Furr’s “Delirious New York” was on view at Sargent’s Daughters (370 Broadway, NYC) from May 9-June 7, 2025. WM 

Notes

1. Gehman, Geoff. “Painter Elizabeth Murray offers clues,” The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania), Friday, April 26, 1996, D14.

2. “Art Exhibition Set for FDU,” The Record, Thursday, September 24, 1970, C9.

3. Smith, Roberta. “Motion Pictures,” in Elizabeth Murray: Painting and Drawings, ed. Sue Graze and Kathy Halbreich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Dallas Museum of Art and the MIT Committee on the Visual Arts, 1987), 13.