For 2019, Peña is working with another New York– based artist, Carrie Moyer, who is represented by DC Moore in Chelsea. Like Eisenman, she has yet another stunning pedigree—she’s a Guggenheim Fellow who has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Peña predicts this year’s ONO curatorial event will be another grand effort that is sure to make headlines, especially since the work being presented has never been seen before. Also, not only is Moyer bringing an impressive résumé to North Texas, her practice is queer-based and calibrated to challenge the ongoing patriarchy evident throughout art history. And the means by which she is accomplishing this is quite simple: she’s creating stunning abstract expressionist art that is vivid, biomorphic, and without a decidedly overt agenda that screams for attention. Instead, she creates sinuous shapes and colors that insinuate flora, water, or even Matisse-y looking black contours.
Born in Detroit, Moyer notes her “hippie parents were itinerant” and, therefore, responsible for her becoming a self-proclaimed autodidact. She is also apt to claim Helen Frankenthaler and Fernand Léger as artists she hearkens back to; however, she also wants to revisit both “the female aesthetic and popularized imagery.” Put another way, Moyer recognizes that she is part of a long history, but she’s also pushing vigorously against the boundaries of any typical polemic. She’s exploring new turf that is both timely and timeless. Moyer is a refreshingly candid voice that questions both patriarchy and typical responses to it. This is not only new; it’s a critically needed shift in terms of understanding feminism and the art that circulates around it.
“Going into your own zone for fourteen hours” is how she describes her working life and, when questioned about beauty, which is often eschewed when it comes to what is deemed a serious feminist aesthetic, she responds, “I like it. The more the better.” She also touts the immediacy of her work and the attendant slowness that ensues after an initial thrilling entrance into it. In fact, she’s fond of saying, “What does the paint do?” For one thing, it apparently yearns to be layered. Her work is complex in ways that are wildly lyric yet veiled when it comes to an “out of the tube” palette. If anything, it becomes clear that Moyer and her work are both highly complex. She wants to create art that appeals to “lots of people” rather than be limited by queer activism. She has outlined her stance in a refreshingly straightforward mantra: “Painting is about painting.”
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