Donald Moffett was born in Texas in 1955 and moved to New York twenty-three years later. Like many artists who came into their own in the late 1980s, he leaned heavily on juxtapositions of text and image in his early work, appropriating mass-media tropes and redirecting them. But unlike the deconstructionists who emerged a decade earlier, analyzing images and taking them apart—Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, for instance—Moffett was bent, or so it seemed, on an activist course, using images to make things happen. In 1987, he wheat-pasted posters he made bearing an orange-and-black target, a black-and-white Ronald Reagan headshot, and the tagline “he kills me” on buildings in lower Manhattan. He Kills Me, today arguably his best-known work, led to significant chapters in Moffett’s career: he became a founding member of the AIDS-activism artist collaborative Gran Fury (1988–93) and, shortly thereafter, a coprincipal, with artist Marlene McCarty, in the design firm Bureau (1988–2001), which produced unorthodox projects for corporate clients, arts organizations, and groups seeking social change.
During those same years, however, in the relative quiet of his studio, Moffett was becoming a painter. His breakthrough occurred in 1994, when he began creating abstract paintings with cake-making tools. These “extruded paintings,” easel-size monochromes with dense loops or bristles of often brightly colored paint resembling fur, are still at the core of his work. The first were solid rectangles, but they’ve since developed complex perforations. Today their thick wood supports are digitally routed.
The extruded paintings have been joined lately by at least two other bodies of work. The “light loops,” started in 2001, are monochrome canvases—generally painted, not extruded—that have video projected onto them. Frequently reverberating with political implications, these began with a triptych featuring footage of Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s powerful denunciation of Richard Nixon during the House Judiciary Committee’s 1974 impeachment proceedings. The “contraptions,” first exhibited at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, in 2012, are sculptural assemblages—made variously of derelict machinery, concrete garden statuary, and other found materials—that serve as dedicated frames or supports for particular paintings, extruded ones predominantly.
Taken together, these three categories of work provide a flexible infrastructure around which, depending on the exhibition, Moffett introduces other mediums, such as photography, drawing, collage, or sound, and changing thematic content. Governmental and individual abominations and violence, especially those directed at gays, are often addressed in his work. But so, too, is a profound preoccupation with material beauty and color. And sex: the holes that are everywhere in his oeuvre are as tender as they are tough.
Moffett’s current New York show, “Any Fallow Field,” at Boesky, is his reflection on whether rural settings and experiences can provide relief from the 24/7 clamor of contemporary life. It contains extruded paintings, canvases that are merely primed before being coated in layers of tinted, translucent resin, and resin-coated landscape photographs. The paintings and photographs are punctured and sometimes shaped by patterns of perforations derived from shotgun blasts and microscope images of plants. All the photographs and some of the paintings hang directly on the wall, with the remaining paintings being incorporated into pared-down contraptions made of found timbers painted white.
...
Read full article at artnews.com.
