Carrie Moyer
Sea of Forms, 2019
Acrylic and glitter on canvas
66 x 60 inches
Bather, 2019
Acrylic and glitter on canvas
66 x 60 inches
The Secret Life of Trees, 2019
Acrylic and glitter on canvas
66 x 60 inches
Marshmallow Squash Blossom, 2019
Acrylic and glitter on canvas
60 x 48 inches
DC Moore Gallery is proud to present Carrie Moyer: More Joy, a one-person booth of recent paintings by Carrie Moyer. Carrie Moyer’s paintings extend the narrative of American Abstraction while engaging the legacies of its key female figures, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elizabeth Murray. The work is both knowing and playful. Some pieces depict strange, convoluted spaces; others are theatrical, one stage flat in front of another. Once inside a picture, viewers are presented with a natural world, stylized or “queered” through humor and the graphic regiments of design and decoration. Paint handling alternates from glistening to matte, flat to chunky and glitter-encrusted. Color is saturated and luscious. The space of our imagination – that beautiful, spacious cavern – is summoned through the use of extreme scale and shifting points of view. Embracing the sensual as much as the cerebral, Moyer’s paintings luxuriate in a material past, present, and future.
In Marshmallow Squash Blossom (2019) undulating silhouettes of bright pink, green, and orange converge around a curvilinear form that resembles a plant or an organ, open for interpretation by the viewer. Atop this shape is a layer of glittered coral-like mesh, that continues the playful oscillation between representing foliage and the body. Through her use of gravity, velocity, and stasis, Moyer transforms and frees vivid primary hues to express new kinds of animation or fullness. Bather (2019), displays a palette of cooler blues and purples, centered by an erupting spindly formation. Each stroke visibly changes speed or direction, ultimately bursting out into bands of color. The infinite range of pictorial illusions reveal Moyer’s ongoing experimentation in acrylic paint.
Carrie Moyer’s recent exhibitions include Pagan’s Rapture at DC Moore Gallery, and the 2017 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, curated by Christopher Lew and Mia Locks. Her work is currently on display in Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Denver, Colorado. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Carrie Moyer: One Night Only, curated by Arthur Peña in Dallas, Texas. She is a Professor in the Art and Art History Department and Director of the Graduate Program at Hunter College, as well as the Vice Chair of the Board of Governors at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.