DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present FIVE, a group exhibition featuring works by Janet Fish, Mark Innerst, Joyce Kozloff, Claire Sherman, and Jimmy Wright, on view through January 30, 2021. The exhibition will give viewers an opportunity to see a selection of works created throughout each of the artists’ careers.
Over the last fifty years, Janet Fish has drawn on her embrace of change and belief in the underlying interconnectedness of objects to fuel her remarkable painting practice. The objects she selects serve as armatures for the exploration of color and light, and exuberantly articulate states of flux. Her paintings are an unending formal experimentation and mastery of multiple genres. Though she works against the idea of capturing a photographic moment, she succeeds in preserving a mood, quality of light, and sense of place to which the viewer can continually return to. The exhibition will showcase works created from the 1980s-early 2000s.
Mark Innerst transforms the urban landscape throughout his career, imbuing it with his unique, deeply resonant beauty, complexity, and luminosity. The works largely focus on New York City and Los Angeles, appearing majestic, immense, and serene. Streetscapes morph into a series of skyward-shooting lines or stacked, layered blocks of color. Vanishing points slip off-center, and buildings sweep downward to street level, where human activity is reduced to blurs of light. In other work on view, Innerst expands on the movement of rushed crowds by closely examining metropolitan gathering spaces, as in Met Museum Interior (2018), which invites new reflection, informed by the altered state of interior public spaces during the pandemic. Throughout, Innerst’s works continually reflect a balance between frenetic movement and stillness that is unique to the artist.
Joyce Kozloff, a major figure in both the Pattern and Decoration and the Feminist art movements since the 1970s, has explored the applied and decorative arts, especially visual cultures of the nonwestern world, as sources for inspiration. Since the 1990s, Kozloff has utilized mapping as a device for consolidating her enduring interests in history, culture, and the decorative and popular arts. She has concentrated on cities countries, and continents, onto which patterns and images reflecting their colonial pasts are then overlaid. Kozloff has also examined maps of international borders and bodies of water. In Girlhood: New Worlds (2017) she unites those interests with unearthed childhood drawings to provide a dialogue between the curiosity and wonderment of youth and a mature understanding of the world. Co-existing social concerns have been an ongoing interest for Kozloff since her start, and her works are both visually satisfying and intellectually questioning.
Claire Sherman’s most recent paintings continue to represent the natural world in a manner that is both recognizable and utterly imaginative. The distorted palette creates an enhanced vividness that is in tension with the dense mesh of branches, broken and askew, and leaves and plants twisted and overgrown. Sherman’s method of painting is clear and direct. She avoids the overworked and achieves a surface imbued with a sense of ease and speed, open to imperfection. In all of her work, sustained research, reading, travel, and photography inform the act of painting.
Jimmy Wright moved to New York in 1974, following a period of graduate study at the Art Institute of Chicago in which he engaged with the emergent group of Chicago Imagist artists. While in New York, Wright originally worked directly from observation, drawing from experiences in bathhouses and clubs. Following the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, he began to focus on the abstract and elegiac qualities of sunflowers and other natural forms to express the passage of time.