Carrie Moyer : Conflagration with Bangs

CONTENT SUMMARY

Carrie Moyer’s first major monograph expansively represents the influential abstract painter’s work and queer agitprop.

Carrie Moyer consciously centers her painting as a practice about painting, with history as a subtext. Known for her incursions into Color Field painting, Moyer also traces her influences to iconic female artists of the twentieth century, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, and surrounding questions of taste, once quipping of her paintings that “[Helen] Frankenthaler and [Fernand] Léger met in a dark corner and had Elizabeth Murray.”

Moyer’s complex work merges abstract aesthetics and legible imagery: vividly colored and textured forms are embedded with a range of historical, stylistic, and physical references to Surrealism, Modernism, 1960s and ’70s counterculture graphics, and ’70s feminist art. Moyer often works on the floor, pouring, rolling, stippling, mopping the paint, and embellishing with glitter. An exploration of acrylic’s unique properties is a driving force in her work. Beginning as an intern at HERESIES, the pioneering feminist art magazine, Moyer has also engaged in critical practices beyond the studio.

This monograph enriches a deep dive into Moyer’s painting practice, in particular her work of the past decade, with a portfolio of the artist’s agitprop from the 1990s, including Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), one of the first lesbian public art projects.