Elizabeth Murray made inventive, exuberant paintings. With their bright palette and apparent humor, they also reflect a spirited seriousness and rigor. She drew inspiration from rich and disparate sources ranging from still lifes by Paul Cézanne to colorful cartoons. Murray's amalgam of seeming opposites—high and low sources, the attributes of painting alongside those of sculpture, both abstract and highly personal imagery—creates powerful tensions in her work. Beginning in the late 1960s, she helped redefine and enliven the practice of painting at a time when many declared painting retrograde. She went on to become one of the most respected artists of our time. Murray enjoyed a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006 and was featured at this year's Venice Biennale. The National Gallery of Art was honored in 1996 to have Elizabeth Murray deliver one of the first Elson Lectures, a forum for distinguished contemporary artists whose work is represented in the Gallery's collection.

The National Gallery has examples of Murray's work in a variety of media, including prints, drawings, and one major painting, Careless Love, 1995–1996. This last work occupies a special and rare place in her career; it was first exhibited in 1989 under a different title (Labyrinth) and with an entirely different appearance. While the shape of the canvas was the same, the work was painted with blue and green hues. In 1995, the artist sanded it down and repainted it, saying, "I still wanted this shape, but I wanted something else in terms of the whole feeling of the painting....I changed the coloration…and it just began to come alive in a whole other way...." Against the organic cuplike shape, the now fleshy pink background lends the work entirely new corporeal allusions.

The title "Careless Love" comes from a jazz song by Ben Webster that the artist listened to while working on the painting. Murray's titles are associative and often offer another layer of meaning relating to the social and political problems of the times. "Careless Love" might be seen to evoke the dangers of passion in the age of AIDS. With its skinlike tonalities, vessellike shape, orifices, and appendages, Careless Love wavers between interior and exterior, in transgression of representational and bodily boundaries.