Carrie Moyer’s new works on paper map out an evolving index of forms that are used from one work to the next or reabsorbed onto canvas, as seen in the painting featured in this exhibition. The term “morphology,” with its utilitarian relationship to biology, actively calls out the natural forms that have been a constant in the artist’s oeuvre for many years. Recent compositions shift between allusions to landscape and the symbolic space of the icon, radiating a sense of timelessness due to the frequent use of symmetry and ornamentation. In this body of work, Moyer looks to the transcendental feeling for nature held by 20th century American painters (Agnes Pelton, Joseph Stella, Charles Burchfield, and Arthur Dove) as well as broader aesthetic traditions of India and Asia.

After creating a large-scale, collaborative work on paper in Italy in 2019, Moyer developed an interest in the quality of light made possible by this material. She continues to explore paper’s unique ability to make color both fluid and luminous in the service of a kind of ‘embodied’ abstraction. She states that “On paper, my fondness for a comic, sci-fi sensibility turns metaphysical and atmospheric through the repeated process of staining, salting, and spraying the surface with inks and water. Everything is saturated.”

Carrie Moyer is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Moyer’s first monograph was released this fall by Rizzoli Electa, and includes writing by Johanna Fateman, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, and Katy Seigel. 

Her work has been exhibited at museums throughout the US and Europe, including Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times at Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, and Portland Museum of Art, ME (2020-22); the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, that originated at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; and Interstellar, at the Worcester Art Museum, MA. Moyer’s writing has appeared in periodicals such as Art in America, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail and monographs on Louise Fishman and Nancy Grossman. She has received awards from the Guggenheim and Joan Mitchell Foundations, Anonymous Was a Woman, and Creative Capital among others. Along with Lisa Corinne Davis, she co-directs the MFA Program in Studio Art at Hunter College.