The American realist Catherine Murphy refers to herself as an observational painter, and her new series of seven paintings and four drawings, on view at Knoedler & Company until August 1, bears out this characterization. Whether her subject is a person curled inside striped bedding, as in Comforter, 2007, or a pair of blankets on a clothesline that part to reveal two picnicking figures, Murphy manages to capture, with a striking degree of naturalistic detail, scenarios that are at once mundane and enigmatic.

At 62, she has a dedicated collector base. A painting depicting Christmas lights strung around a window and two drawings—of liquid spilled from a broken vase and of a felled tree trunk split crosswise—were bought just before the show opened, on May 1, and by the end of the first week, five of the eight remaining pieces had either sold or were on reserve. At $65,000 and $75,000 apiece, the works are modestly valued compared with those of many midcareer artists these days. Murphy’s prices may have remained reasonable in part because only eight of her pictures have ever come up at auction. Her record is $27,500, paid at Sotheby’s New York in 1989 for her 1978 canvas Elena, Harry and Alan in the Backyard, an image of three youths lounging on a lawn.

This is Murphy’s first exhibition in New York since 2005 and her first ever with Knoedler. The gallery’s director, Ann Freedman, says she invited Murphy to show there two years ago but had to wait until now for a full series of paintings to be finished, because of Murphy’s slow and deliberate creative process. Luckily for her patient collectors, Murphy’s art doesn’t appear vulnerable to the whims of the market. “She’s been working in this way for a long time,” says Freedman. “She is not part of any trend.”

"Virtual Reality" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.