On Saturday, December 8, 2005, Betty Cuningham Gallery will open an exhibition of the new paintings and drawings by Gordon Moore.
True to his early work, Moore's paintings and drawings remain abstract and reductive. His minimal, intentional, use of color favors his strong graphic lines. Moore employs various combinations of latex and water based paints, ink, pencil and finely ground pumice to create works where stained/painted surfaces are divided by an irregular grid of edges made from individual rectangular templates. Moore's lines weave through and undulate in the light of the surface as well as in front and behind the mesh-grid.
Inspired by both the physical urban landscape and the concepts of classical and modern philosophers, Moore's work illustrates the interaction between his artifacts - plastic construction netting and iron rebar - through the lens of modern philosophical analysis - the example of one such concept being John Ruskin's, "art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth." Through the merger of the physical and the conceptual, Moore's paintings and drawings seek to discuss the dual existence of the transitory and the fixed, the animate and inanimate, the permanent and the ephemeral.
Moore, born in Cherokee, Iowa in 1947, graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970 and subsequently attended Yale, where he received his MFA in 1972. In 1976 Moore had his first one-man exhibition at Cuningham Ward in New York. Since 1976 Moore has been included in several group and solo shows. He received the National Endowment for the Arts-Visual Artists Fellowship (1980), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Painting (1991) and the Adolph & Ester Gottlieb Foundation Award in Painting (2001).
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Dave Hickey. It will remain on view through Saturday, January 28, 2006. For further information and photographs please contact the gallery at 212 242 2772 or www.info@bettycuninghamgallery.com. The gallery is located on the ground floor of 541 W. 25th St., between 10th and 11th Avenues.
NOTE: The gallery will be closed from Saturday, December 24, 2005 through Monday, January 2, 2006.
For further information, complete biography, bibliography, photographs and/or catalogue, please contact the gallery
via phone at 212 242-2772
or via e-mail: info@bettycuninghamgallery.com.
