Carrie Moyer’s High-Wattage paintings mash up stylistically opposed forms of the past—Color Field and hard-edge—with pours, pools and stains of gorgeous color, locked down by crisp, overlapping forms. Eye candy with art-historical smarts, these canvases also supply sly feminist correctives to the macho legacy of American abstraction (stain painting, for example, was basically invented by Helen Frankenthaler).
In two works, Belvedere and Sala de Dos Hermanas, flat arcades frame curvaceous figures that recall the bodies of prehistoric fertility goddesses. Passages of glitter enliven other canvases, evoking cosmetics or children’s crafts. Candy Cap features repetitive shapes in the avocado and burnt-orange shades of 1970s graphic design.
But amid Moyer’s excess of pictorial and historical signifiers, the allusions to physical functions hit the hardest. Candy Cap includes drips of repellent, urine yellow, while in Vieni Qui Bella, blood-red veils of paint glower behind a matte green skein resembling a pelvic bone. The painting conjures the messiness of menstruation and other discharges from the female body embraced by first-generation feminist artists. Moyer packs all this history, psychology and politics into visually and intellectually satisfying compositions that reflect upon the achievements of abstraction while pushing it forward.