DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present, for EXPO Chicago, works by Eric Aho, Theresa Daddezio, Carrie Moyer, Claire Sherman, and Barbara Takenaga - five artists who each create abstract paintings based upon elements within the natural world.
Using the metaphor of a body as a container, Theresa Daddezio explores notions of consciousness, fragility, and sexuality within a language of painting and its history of abstraction. Through an embodied concept of time and place, she creates optical undulations of flatness, depth, vibrancy, and subtlety.
Eric Aho is an American painter known for his gestural, abstracted paintings that evoke natural forms. While Aho works from his impressions of the landscape, he also draws upon major pillars of art history—such as works by De Kooning and Goya—to define his compositions. Aho sees this series of paintings as remembered glimpses of the landscape passed on a walk through the woods in search of something, toward some unknown destination.
Carrie Moyer’s sumptuous paintings on canvas explore and extend the legacy of American Abstraction while paying homage to many of its seminal female figures among them Helen Frankenthaler, Elizabeth Murray, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Rife with visual precedents, Moyer’s compositions reference Color Field, Pop Art, and 1970s Feminist art - while proposing a new approach to fusing history, research, and experimentation in painting. In addition, the artist is influenced by a background in design and queer activism, and she intricately weaves together concept, research, and lived experience with a range of stylistic and physical references.
Claire Sherman’s work represents the natural world in a manner that makes her landscapes both recognizable and utterly imaginative, inviting yet daunting. Sherman both witnesses and explores extremes of climate change and the effects of invasive species crowding out native ones. There is a cycle of invasiveness, chaos, and growth, ever-present in the paintings, as seen by nature’s tangled, twisting forms that flow off the canvas.The idea of a new environmental order, beautiful yet ominous, has become central to Sherman’s body of work.
Barbara Takenaga arranges the simple components of her dense, abstract paintings into stunningly detailed compositions that undulate, radiate, and recede in seemingly infinite space. Her dazzling repetition of forms suggests the inherent yet sometimes incomprehensible logic of both the cosmic and the cellular, while spontaneous twists and puckers preserve the elements of wonder and surprise.