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This Pair (for H. T.)

A 1987 artwork by Elizabeth Murray, This Pair (for H. T.), is a towering, shaped canvas oil-painting with the appearance of varnished wood or heavily worked leather, such as of a shoe or cello. In shape arguably its adjacent and overlapping parts most resemble an antique guitar body and a strangely wide and blocky neck, which has been detached and leaned against it, overhanging and obstructing the right half of its curvy outline from view. Another part closely resembles a stove- or an exhaust pipe emerging from the lower left of the ostensible guitar body and abruptly bending left. From low on the oddly blocky neck piece, an equally varnished looking rectangular horn bell projects rightward. The vacant darkness of a seemingly simple circular opening in the same block face near the top makes the neck piece seem as likely to be an air duct.

Murray’s three-dimensional painting spans almost seven feet of wall and, mounted a foot above the floor, the top of it is more than ten feet up. The artwork seems to require moving around for views at different angles, including side-on looks from against the wall, from which it unquestionably sticks out. It’s hard to judge what about it is sculptural, and what may be only a depiction in paint. This Pair resembles a painting most of all, mainly because Murray has snugly and flushly fitted every face of the wooden structure underneath with canvas, and painted it like one.

Along the junctions between the front-, left- and right-side panels of the duct-like neck and where it overhangs the guitar-like piece, Murray has painted dark shading lines—as if, in other words, these edges were not really there to cast shade of their own. At the same time, she has angled and proportioned these panels for a deceptively more three-dimensional appearance—in the way slender coins depict kings and presidents in relief, and paintings do by way of perspective. The illusion becomes obvious viewing the leaning neck from the side: Because the opening that Murray cut near the top is actually an oval, and appears circular only from the front.

The piece of the artwork that looks like a protruding stove- or exhaust pipe, protrudes and remains round at all angles, on the other hand, and it looks even more pipe-like around the rim, where with orange and red Murray has painted a strong resemblance to corrosion. Murray has also realistically rimmed a circular hole low and in front just to the right of where the pipe pops out, which appears to match the high opening in the neck, but this hole just isn’t there at all, being an entirely flat creation in paint.

There’s no way to know really what angles and shapes are real, since unlike a recognizable face on a coin, whatever Murray’s artwork is depicting looks to be fanciful. What’s for sure are the deliberate clues and contradictions. You may just conclude that it’s a puzzle.