DC Moore Gallery at the Armory Show

DC Moore Gallery's presentation at the Armory Show explores the compelling directions of contemporary abstraction through a selection of new paintings by Robert Kushner, Carrie Moyer, and Barbara Takenaga. Each of these artists creates visually stunning work that critically engages both the history of art and our contemporary culture.

In Kushner's paintings, calligraphic botanical imagery meets structured geometric grids to address issues of gender and decoration within the narrative of Western modernism. Utilizing a full spectrum of color, gold and silver leaf, and a fracturing of space, Kushner creates paintings that disrupt the narrative surrounding decoration while exploring the importance of beauty in contemporary art. Robert Kushner: Portraits & Perennials is on view at DC Moore Gallery through March 18.

Takenaga's dense matrices of dots and lines invoke earthly and cosmic landscapes that inquire into the emotional weight of imagined spaces and natural phenomena. Through her process of random background pours of paint and an ordered, labor-intensive approach, she constructs funnels, geodes, maps, and webs that present portals or aerial views from places hovering above and beyond earth where an elastic reality pervades and parallel worlds could be the norm rather than the exception. The Williams College Museum of Art will present a 20-year retrospective of the artist opening in Fall 2017 and Takenaga's site-specific mural installation, Nebraska, is currently on view at MASS MoCA.

Moyer's sumptuous canvases 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. In her embodied abstractions, Moyer uses gravity, velocity and stasis to transform and liberate vivid primary hues, resulting in unique expressions of animation and fullness. Carrie Moyer will be included in this year's upcoming Whitney Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Kushner, Moyer, and Takenaga share the ability to make meaning by combining a fluency in multiple techniques and styles with unconventional materials, from glitter and metallic paint to unprimed canvas and antique book pages.