In keeping with the spirit of the late sixties, Elizabeth Murray abandoned painting in favor of interdisciplinary and multimedia works shortly after moving to New York but resumed her painting practice by 1977. By the early 1980s, Murray had become known for her ability to transform images of common items such as coffee cups, tables, musical instruments and dogs into cannily abstracted and lushly painted relief paintings. Breaking with her early minimalist influences, Murray defined her own particular brand of representation as a balance between illusionistic painting and dimensional sculpture.

Elizabeth Murray (1940 - 2007) earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (1962) and her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA (1964) and moved to New York in 1967. She received her first one-person exhibition in New York in 1976 at the Paula Cooper Gallery.

Murray’s work has been in several of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial Exhibitions (1973,1979, and 1985); a survey of her paintings and drawings was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art (1987); and a retrospective of her prints toured museums throughout the United States and Japan (1990).

Murray began printing with ULAE in 1985, initially turning to lithography as the closest approximation of her drawings. By the 1990s, she was working with ULAE staff to create prints with three-dimensional attributes to better approximate her increasingly sculptural paintings.