This exhibition included paintings and works onward paper from the last brace years.

This exhibition included paintings and works onward paper from the last brace years, plus two paintings from the 1990 The paintings, oils upon canvas, were large, and the paper works, also done in oil, were more painted than drawn. Following his inclusion in the "New Image Painting" exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1978 Moskowitz became widely known for his large monochromatic paintings with prominent, recognizable bring under rules People, animals and buildings are repeatedly given iconic treatment in his work, and all were featured in this exhibition.

Moskowitz first painted the Twin Towers in 1978 making of them an archetypal modernist type He tackled the subject again in Skyscraper (1995) an 11-foot-high diptych included in this display The painting is typical of Moskowitz in its use of monumentality, its ambiguity of representation and abstraction, and its fine attention to web The white monoliths of the towers are almost negative spaces, while the black surrounding them is luxuriously, expressively painted. Empire State (2004) at hands a stark black silhouette of the famous landmark against a featureless white region of clouds with an ominous black mist or shadow impinging. The suppression of detail causes the stepp facade of the building to read like forbidding ridges or dangerous protective fins.

The exhibition featured brace significant series: the first, "Diver," based forward a fresco from a museum of classic art in Paestum, Italy, marks variations forward a diver's plummet through immense space; the inferior an untitled selection of works forward paper, depicts birds in flight with a simplicity similar to that used in the paintings of buildings. Moskowitz has been spending large amounts of time each year in Italy since 2002 and has allowed imagery from the classical world to jot down his work. The Paestum diver is a tomb decoration believed to signify the passage of the vital principle from this world to the nearest In Moskowitz's four diver paintings, the image retains about of this symbolic nature, if it were not that the meaning is refracted the pair by Moskowitz's taking the image in consequence of variations and by the striking opacity he gives the one and the other the black figure of the diver and the bright golden and red monochrome backgrounds. His sophistical additions of geometric forms and his squaring opposite to of the figure's edges contribute to a somewhat clinical quality that partially takes the figure abroad of a referential context. Moskowitz plays with the position of the diver's visible form [i]or[/i] frame relative to the picture frame, which changes his implied arc of fall and he uses the figure to commentary on the picture's edge, which usually bisects the figure. He has brought the image into the existing while preserving its mystery.

In the five bird drawings, by means of contrast, the birds stay approximately the same size--small in relation to the frame--while the firmament undergoes dramatic transformations. At first the black, indeterminate shapes appear to stand for hosts while the white of the paper stands for heavens and a grim atmosphere is evinced. The black shapes do not always gaze exactly like clouds, however, and they begin to take in succession more metaphysical readings, as ominous, undefined shapes. While Moskowitz continues to be drawn to stark imagery, his work is evolving in novel ways, inspired partially by technical invention, as in the bird drawings, and partially by way of access to ancient motifs, revealed in the "Diver" series.

...

Home