Photo By Gail

Created over a span of two years, Bathroom Sink (1994) is based on a tableau the artist meticulously arranged in her home bathroom. Catherine Murphy went to extraordinary lengths to leave the scene of cut locks of hair undisturbed, including building a second bathroom, so that this one could be exclusively dedicated to painting.

While all of her work is painted from observation rather than photography, the artist acknowledges the framing nonetheless suggests the camera’s eye. Indeed, Murphy emerged as a realist painter in the late 1960s when many critics assessed that, regardless of whether a given painter used photography, their work inevitably assimilated many of the characteristics associated with the medium, such as cropping, close-up views, and radical disjunctions of scale.

Photographed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA)  in Los Angeles.