ART CITIES: N.York-Carrie Moyer
Carrie Moyer’s vibrant paintings and works on paper critically interrogate the formal and conceptual conventions of painting while embracing an approach to abstraction rooted in optical pleasure. Moyer’s playful compositions, layered surfaces, and fluid forms, which freely oscillate between abstraction and representation, speak not only to her commitment to feminist political theory, but also to her deep investment in art history.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Alexander Gray Associates Gallery Archive
Carrie Moyer’s new abstract paintings and works that are on show in her solo exhibition “Timber!” on paper speak to the sensations provoked by social and environmental instability. The show’s title, Moyer writes, “is a warning best imagined in a comic strip. It brings awareness to one’s surroundings. Waiting for something to fall, the other shoe to drop”. Throughout her career, Moyer has deployed abstraction as a vehicle for queer expression and politics. In her recent paintings, movement, gravity, and stasis are investigated anew through an expanded repertoire of materials that radically alter the surface of the canvas as well as the flow of poured paint. Inspired by the magnitude of geological processes, atmospheric currents, and planetary orbits, Moyer explains, “I am thinking about very large forces, and how they might show up in a painting.” The artist’s recent canvases such as “Tears on My Pillow” (2024) incorporate pumice, an extrusive volcanic rock. Other compositions like “Etna’s Folly” (2024) integrate powdered minerals derived from semi-precious stones, metal, and graphite. Using these shimmering natural substances, Moyer invokes associations between painting and alchemy. In doing so, she complicates an art historical lineage stretching back to prehistoric cave painting by adopting materials linked to extractive industries. Moyer’s canvases and collages present physical and social transformation as a process that occurs across multiple strata of perception. “I want to make surfaces that are expansive, that operate both microscopically and macroscopically,” she states. Her carefully layered compositions juxtapose vivid, fluid drips and luminous expanses of pigment with fixed contours and matte grounds. Works such as “Crying – Waiting – Hoping” (2024), with its undulations of fiber paste, echo both anatomical curves and molten flows, while compositions like “Pyroplastica” (2024) interlock bodily and natural phenomena in moments of uncanny sensual contact. Emphasizing the sensorial, the artist employs techniques drawn from the legacy of post-war abstraction—drawing, pouring, staining, rolling, sprinkling, and mopping—while integrating strategies of graphic design. Meanwhile, the quick-witted titles of these works point toward the myriad problems we face as humans, as nations, as a planet … and yet we go on. There’s something funny about it”. Moyer’s paintings and drawings expand traditional notions of abstraction by imbuing associations between process, form, and content with her feminist socio-political perspective. The artist’s recent works speak to, in her words, “both the pleasure and precarity of the moment”.
Photo: Carrie Moyer, Crying – Waiting – Hoping, 2024, Acrylic, fiber paste, pumice, and bronze powder on canvas, 78 x 96 in (198.1 x 243.8 cm), © Carrie Moyer, Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates Gallery
Info: Alexander Gray Associates Gallery, 384 Broadway, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/9-26/10/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:00, www.alexandergray.com/
