Carrie Moyer: Timber!

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Carrie Moyer: Timber!, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery. Moyer’s new abstract paintings and works 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. As she attests, “The main impetus for my work is always what can I do with this material, acrylic paint, and what can it suggest (poetically, conceptually, materially, physically, etc.)?” 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, per Moyer, “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.” 

Moyer’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and two-person presentations, including Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times, Portland Museum of Art, ME (2020), traveled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2021); Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2013), traveled to Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, OH (2014), and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2014); and Carrie Moyer: Interstellar, Worcester Art Museum, MA (2012), among others. Moyer has participated in many group exhibitions, including Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, NY (2023), traveling to Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (forthcoming 2024); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Agitprop!, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015), and others. The artist’s works are represented in public collections, including Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including National Academician, National Academy of Design (2019); Guggenheim Fellowship (2013); Anonymous Was A Woman (2009), and others. Moyer is a Professor and the Co-Director of the graduate studio program at Hunter College in New York. She is also on the Board of Governors at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.