DC Moore Gallery

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Interlayered, an exhibition of work by Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Whitfield Lovell, and Chie Fueki. Each of these artists create intricate explorations of space, meaning, and memory. Interweaving repetition, reference, order, and disjunction, each artwork contains complex networks of relations. These relationships extend inward and outwards, including the viewer in a participatory search for meaning. On view are rare examples of Valerie Jaudon’s earliest paintings, which add context to a major 1976 painting currently on view at MoMA in the acclaimed exhibition, Woven Histories. A pioneer of Postminimalism, Jaudon subverted the dominant conventions of geometric abstraction, merging references to the decorative traditions of Islamic and Celtic art, as well as Gothic architecture. Jaudon was drawn to the intricate designs of these traditions, as well as their duality of being highly cultivated and broadly popular arts. She sees abstraction as a shared form of communication: “A painting is a kind of decoding device for the culture from which it comes. We live in a world that’s complicated and abstract––nothing is simple anymore.” Jaudon interweaves open-ended systems of straight lines and curves to create subtly disordered order. These interlocking patterns, while seemingly continuous, are full of stops and starts, creating a labyrinthine network of disruptions and possibilities. Joyce Kozloff has been known since the 1970s for her political and feminist artwork addressing cross-cultural issues. In the 1990s, Kozloff began using cartography as a framework to draw out connections between patterns of political, social, economic, and cultural power. Densely overlapping systems of information, she creates literal and conceptual collages. Her three Bodies of Water paintings (1997-98) are rare instances of the artist incorporating the body into her mapping works. Kozloff layers diagrams of the human circulatory, digestive, and respiratory systems over navigational charts of the Baltic Sea. Kozloff created the works after traveling these waterways herself, inflecting the supposedly objective form of the map with her direct experience. Merging the macro and the microscopic, the works investigate the embodied experience of movement and travel and the creation of knowledge. Whitfield Lovell’s The Card Pieces (2018-2022) is a room-sized installation of fifty-three works. Previously shown at museums including the Mint Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Cincinnati Art Museum in the exhibition Whitfield Lovell: Passages organized by the American Federation of Arts, this is the first time the work has been shown in New York City. In the work, Lovell pairs an image of an individual with a collaged playing card from a vintage deck, fifty-two cards and one joker. Connoting luck, chance, or fate, these pairings of cards and faces ask us to consider the hand we are dealt and the way we play the game. In this work, Lovell’s fascination with history and untold stories dovetails with his own memories of family. As he explains, his interest in cards stems from “cards being so present in my culture growing up. There was always a deck of cards present whether people were playing cards or not.” The series draws our attention to the formal features of cards, the numbers, suits, and designs of the cards suggesting personality, experiences or meaning associated with the juxtaposed figures. Exploring kinship, each individual stands in relation to the larger group, with possible connections drawn through proximity, placement in the deck, or potential for play. Chie Fueki, a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, is known for her singular, striking paintings that explore memory and longing. Her current paintings collapse time and place, portraiture and landscape, creating reflective shared spaces animated by light and energy. Drawing on her experience growing up in a Japanese community in São Paolo, Brazil, Fueki synthesizes art historical languages, culturally-coded signifiers, and personal emblems. Layering cut and painted papers, Fueki’s complex, tactile surfaces create a nuanced interplay between the viewer and the painting: “While I invite the viewer to participate in building associations and meaning through the forms depicted on my surfaces, I also want them to feel the weight of the wooden panel on the wall, the size of the painting-support about their body, and the surfaces that refract, absorb light, shine and reflect at them. In the mid-19th century, the philosopher Robert Vischer invented the term Einfühlung or empathy theory. He wrote that a viewer unconsciously projects its bodily form––and with this also the soul––into the form of the object.”

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present George Woodman: A Democracy of Parts, Paintings 1966-1978, its debut exhibition of George Woodman’s work in collaboration with the Woodman Family Foundation. Focusing on geometric abstractions from a significant period within the artist’s six-decade career, the exhibition traces the development of Woodman’s singular approach to pattern. This exhibition marks the first time the artist’s paintings from this period have been shown in New York since the 1980s.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Claire Sherman: Petrichor. In this exhibition of large-scale landscapes, Claire Sherman explores the desert as a site of dramatic juxtaposition. Complicating the imagery associated with grand, sublime landscapes of the American West, Sherman focuses on subjects that exist at the periphery of our attention, distorting scale and perspective to draw us into new spaces. In Sherman’s paintings of rocky canyons, waterfalls, crevices, and desert flora, spaces enclose and unravel around the viewer. Light pours through narrow gaps in these imposing edifices, suggesting a path through. Sherman visualizes the oppositions inherent to the desert, of extreme heat contrasted to the evidence of water, manifested in spaces carved out by the force of water and the growth of wildflowers and sagebrush. The exhibition’s title, Petrichor, refers to a sweet smell that arrives in the desert after it rains, released from the dry soil. Sherman relates the scent of petrichor to anticipation, heralding a storm as well as signaling to animals to follow the scent to water. Sherman’s paintings present this multivalent phenomenon as akin to the sublime, something alluring that can also portend danger. The works in the exhibition are informed by the artist’s own experiences hiking several American deserts over many seasons. The locations vary widely, appearing at once particular and ubiquitous. The anonymity of place allows the paintings to open up psychological spaces, becoming their own locations. Sherman’s gestural brushwork, painted wet-on-wet, creates dense tangles of undergrowth, geological strata, and thunderous waterfalls. Shifting between abstraction and representation, Sherman captures a moment between movement and stasis, suspending the viewer in the unsettled rhythms of the natural world. This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a text by Terry Tempest Williams excerpted from The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. Claire Sherman has exhibited widely throughout the United States and in Amsterdam, Leipzig, London, Seoul, and Turin. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Yaddo, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Sherman earned her BA from The University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Other Worldly, an exhibition of unbounded landscapes, shadow worlds, and dream-like narratives. These works present portals, collapsing the physical and psychological, still life and landscape, micro and macrocosm. Recognizable forms and familiar object appear like signposts, while art historical references and pop culture allusions are translated into new languages. Through different means, these artists capture elemental qualities of our shared, tangible world, casting them into potential mirror universes. Mary Frank, Mark Innerst, Joshua Marsh, and Barbara Takenaga use repetition and twinned figures to create afterimages, merging interior and exterior worlds. Darren Waterston evokes a landscape in flux, with forms waxing and waning like light, while Katia Santibañez depicts nature as an infinite spiral. JoAnne Carson constructs hybrid trees that each become their own individual cosmos. Amy Cutler and Duane Michals, in their distinctive visual languages, employ narrative surrealism to explore conditions of being human. Together, the works in this exhibition layer remembered spaces with future forms, yet to be dreamt.

DC Moore Gallery presents Theresa Daddezio: Bloom, fifteen paintings created in the course of the past two years. Theresa Daddezio’s paintings shed light, revealing speculative fictions and near-futures where human and plant forms entwine. Deeply rooted in abstraction and color theory, Daddezio builds worlds through seemingly impossible collisions and harmonies of color. Neither wholly synthetic nor organic, hues of lush magnetas, furious green-golds, and silver-purples cross-pollinate. Her sense of color evokes both late 20th-century transcendental abstraction and Orphic lyricism, resonating with the work of Sonia Delaunay, Ferdinand Leger, Agnes Pelton, and František Kupka. Petal-like structures bloom from intricate linear forms, suggesting the botanical rhizome. Daddezio paints these as channels for transporting light, color, and energy across the canvas. Patterns replicate, and loop back onto themselves, becoming body-like forms or strands of code. These systems are in constant flux, operating according to their own mysterious parameters of space and time. Daddezio’s varied brushwork creates shifts between layers, openings and recesses within the plane of the painting. Her recent work is inspired by a sense of mystery and intimacy within 14th-century Madonna and Child paintings from St. Agnes Monastery in Prague. Daddezio examines the spatial hierarchies and compositions of Medieval paintings through a lens of the flattening and fragmentation of contemporary space, developing pictorial realms: ground/underworld, middle/earth, and top/celestial. Ribbons and cords create links within this hierarchy of space. Imagery emerges, shifts, and transforms into new symbolic structures of the biological, conjuring scientific and religious quests for meaning. The Dove (2024) lifts imagery from Master from Großgmain’s Coronation of the Virgin Mary (1480–1490), compressing space-time to situate the symbolic dove amid Daddezio’s world of blooming forms: a drop of gothic naturalism seeping through the fabric of the present moment. While evoking transcendental painting and Medieval cosmology, Daddezio’s landscapes are imbued with a sense of loss for our changing climate. As Andrew Woolbright writes, “The spiritual is her acknowledgment ‘that nothing ceases.’ It is a concept of spirit that is bound up in ecological dread and death, a kind of post-humanist spiritualism. … We have time to consider a plant that never was, may never be, that Daddezio keeps and preserves somewhere else. But just as easily, the intensity of our focus may remind us of our own garden, and of all the natural miracles they sustain, to maintain and care for in the here and now.” The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Andrew Woolbright. Daddezio also curated the group exhibition, Earthbound, which runs concurrently. Theresa Daddezio lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in Visual Art from Hunter College (2018). She participated in Brooklyn’s Sharpe Walentas Studio Program (2021-22) as well as the Wassaic Residency Project in upstate New York (2018). Daddezio has exhibited work at Nathalie Karg Gallery, Hesse Flatow, DC Moore Gallery, and New York Studio School (New York City); Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn); Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia); the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; and Studio Kura (Itoshima, Japan). Daddezio’s work was also featured in New American Paintings (2021).

Since the ancient times of Aristotle and the Greeks, the enigma of color and light has complicated our understanding of ourselves as earthbound. Our desire to reach beyond these elemental forces confirms our shared humanity and provokes deeper inquiries into spirituality and deeper meaning. This exhibition showcases a selection of artists whose explorations of color and materiality are profoundly rooted in these philosophical questions. From the inclusion of surrealist impulses to imagery from the natural world, Alicia Adamerovich, Olive Diamond, Rico Gatson, Greg Lindquist, Amy Lincoln, Loren Munk, Roxy Paine, Hedda Sterne, and Martha Tuttle, address the formal and symbolic applications of light and color, evoking the synthesis between the material and psychological, transcendental and embodied experience of human consciousness. Each artist takes on a varied approach in their work that constitutes the natural elements of our environment; Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Collectively, these artists illuminate the dualism between ground and above. Through their masterful use of color, light, symbol, and material, they encourage a reflection on one's own connection to the world, the divine, and to one another.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Romare Bearden: Paris Blues/Jazz and Other Works, bringing to light the series known as Paris Blues, or Jazz, created in 1981. Exhibited here in a rare opportunity to view the series of 19 collages, Romare Bearden’s Paris Blues/Jazz makes a major statement on the relationships between visual art, jazz music, and urban spaces. In these works, Bearden translates the patterns and rhythms of jazz into visual compositions, the medium of collage paralleling its improvisational and collaborative nature.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Eric Aho: Wild Meadow, an exhibition of new paintings. Following his last exhibition, Threshold, which explored the spaces where forest and wetlands meet, Aho’s series of new work emerges out through the woods into the light and air of an open meadow. Aho embraces the meadow a space of contradictions, both still and humming with life, unruly yet organized by mysterious systems.

In conjunction with the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: Builders, DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Friends of Friends, an exhibition tracing personal connections between major 20th century artists. These artists worked, studied, taught, and exhibited alongside each other, forged friendships, supported and inspired each other. Featuring works by: Emma Amos (1937-2020), Romare Bearden (1911-1988), Roy DeCarava (1919-2009), David Driskell (1931-2020), Philip Evergood (1901-1973), Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988), Gwen Knight (1913-2005), Jack Levine (1915-2010), Richard Mayhew (b. 1924), Augusta Savage (1892-1962), Ben Shahn (1898-1969), George Tooker (1920-2011), James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), and Walter Williams (1920-1998).

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Jacob Lawrence: Builders, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and prints spanning from 1974-2000. Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is an iconic presence in 20th century art. He uniquely harnessed the power of the figurative, the narrative, and the abstract to address major social and philosophical themes. His engagement with African American subject matter was groundbreaking. During the last three decades of his life, Lawrence consistently pursued the subject of Builders, an unparalleled commitment within his work. A continuation of his dedication to themes from daily life, the Builders are a manifestation of his belief in human agency and the dignity of work. The Builders symbolize a variety of ideas about life and work, particularly in Black communities. Altogether, the Builders paintings are philosophical reflections on the human condition, addressing the role and responsibility of all people to the improvement of society.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Who Is There?, a group exhibition of personal, expressive landscapes. The works in the show merge abstraction and representation, depicting threshold spaces and hybridized forms where the observed and the imaginative meet. Evoking our physical presence in the landscape, these landscapes bring forth the sensations of light, heat, and weather. In many works, the presence of a figure is implied but not made visible, eliciting the question, who is there?

For his latest exhibition, Alexi Worth presents a group of three-part paintings, colorful and puzzling ensembles of disparate images. “More like triplets than triptychs,” as Worth describes them, the new works resemble rebuses or comics sequences, bands of adjoining, semi-independent pictures that complicate and complement each other.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Amy Cutler: Limbo, the artist’s debut exhibition at the gallery, featuring new paintings on paper and drawings. Amy Cutler is represented by DC Moore Gallery in cooperation with Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Barbara Takenaga: Whatsis, an exhibition of new paintings on view through April 27. In recent years, Barbara Takenaga has explored the space between control and randomness, creating vast imagined spaces that evoke the interconnectedness of the natural world. Her new bodies of work continue this duality of fluidity and structure, while introducing graphic and geometric forms. Takenaga translates, recombines, and hybridizes these visual systems, reinterpreting them across cultures and generations.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Robert Kushner: Antella Windows and Curtains, an exhibition of new still life paintings. In April and May of 2023, Robert Kushner visited the Woodman Residency Foundation, the former home and studios of Betty and George Woodman outside of Antella, Italy. Working in George Woodman’s former painting and photography studio, surrounded by olive groves and blue hills, Kushner began the series of paintings on view, completing the works when they were shipped back to his studio in New York. Incorporating still life subjects from the surrounding gardens, fields, and kitchen cabinets, Antella Windows and Curtains explores the relationship between interior and exterior.

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude, opening February 8th and continuing through March 16th, 2024. This is the first major solo exhibition of this important 20th century artist in over 20 years, and one of the only ones to highlight Cadmus’s highly finished male nude drawings. Seven rarely exhibited paintings will be on view in this exhibition, placing these intimate drawings in context and opening a conversation between these two sides of Cadmus’s practice. This will be a unique opportunity to see major works by this 20th-century master.