Times are queer in Carrie Moyer’s twin exhibitions at DC Moore and Mary Boone Galleries, where the New York-based painter introduces exceptional, unabashedly jubilant new paintings of acrylic and glitter on canvas. During a preview of Pagan’s Rapture at DC Moore, the artist walked the audience through her buoyant abstractions while elucidating the transformation of her practice to its current phase. “For many years I thought of myself as a kind of ‘Minister of Propaganda’ for various lesbian and queer causes,” she said, “I’m interested in taking that same passionate sense of urgency and transformation and, by conveying it through abstraction, making it accessible to a wide variety of viewers.”
For decades, Moyer created posters and graphics for numerous gay and lesbian liberation organizations and Dyke Action Machine!, the queer agitprop duo she cofounded with photographer Sue Schaffner in 1991. Since the early 2000s, she has channeled her activist soul—in voluptuous forms and glimmering drips—onto canvas with painterly virtuosity. “My paintings reflect my own oblique subject position as a lesbian woman in relation to canonical culture,” Moyer explained, “The position allows me to burrow through decades of stale, over-determined critique and rediscover the pleasurable and liberating aspects of painting.” In both exhibitions, the urgency of agitprop veers away from its usual candidness towards a revelation of color, form, and technique. The artist adroitly manipulates her surfaces with dense, matte colors in thick slabs of paint, urging the audience to speculate on subjectivities and narratives insinuated but never imposed. Her figures are whimsical and tentative, ignited by humor, fluency, and breaths of inspiration, freed from explicit political declarations.
...
Read full review at brooklynrail.org.
