DC Moore Gallery Art Basel OVR: Miami Beach 2020

Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) is one of the most prominent American painters of the twentieth century, and his work is held in public collections throughout the country. Lawrence frequently chose to treat American historical subject matter, with a resolutely modern aesthetic. Whether drawing attention to leaders of the past or depicting the everyday challenges of African-American life in his day, Lawrence saw his art as a means to underscore the universality of shared experience. His work is direct and forceful, in keeping with his lasting conviction that art can affect social change.

Carrie Moyer's paintings extend the narrative of American Abstraction, engaging the legacies of many of its key female figures, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elizabeth Murray. The work is both knowing and playful and rife with visual precedents, referencing Color Field, Pop Art, and 1970s Feminist Art, while proposing a new approach to fusing history, research, and experimentation in painting. Some works 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 regimens of design and decoration. Treating color more like a three-dimensional substance, Moyer pushes its possibilities past the concrete and obvious towards a kind of "embodied" abstraction. In Moyer's compositions color is the sole character, playing every role: energy, matter, figure, ooze, architecture, the cosmic, and the cosmos. With a wry sense of humor, her art also draws from pop culture, media, and design, blurring the gap between high and low culture. 

Whitfield Lovell’s installations and individual works incorporate hand-drawn images of African Americans with found objects. His imagery is derived from his personal collection of hundreds of photographs mostly taken during the era between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. Lovell often pairs his subjects with vintage items, evoking personal memories, ancestral connections, and the collective past. The human significance and the quality of the drawn images with evocative objects draw a connection to the past, points to the future and reaches across racial and gender lines. 

Lovell lives in New York City, is a MacArthur Fellow, and has recently had a solo exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC accompanied by a monograph published by Rizzoli, and a one-person, one work exhibition at MoMA in New York. His installations have been shown at museums across the country and his work is in many public collections including the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Baltimore Museum, High Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

They are unapologetically decorative, celebrating a mixture of expansiveness, openness, and complexity. Color, line, drawing are the major elements in his painterly repertoire.  His new works in this presentation demonstrate a sense of grandeur, simplicity of composition and exploration of unexpected color harmonies.

Most recently, Kushner’s work has been included in several national and international museum exhibitions focusing on the Pattern and Decoration movement: With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2019-2020); Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2019); Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Vienna, Austria, and Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2018-2019); Pattern, Decoration & Crime, MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2018-2019).