SAM MOYER

Sam Moyer’s works merge abstraction and materiality, redefining conventional sculptural forms through her innovative use of natural materials. Inlaying stone into canvas, she blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, creating wall-mounted works that emphasize variations in surface and light. In these new paintings, Moyer meditates on the dualities inherent in life—the coexistence of decay and growth, loss and perspective, endings and emergent beginnings. Reflecting on what she describes as a “bifurcation in meaning,” the works are born from trying times, capturing a moment of balance between extremities. Moyer describes these dualities in the work as, “The bridge between early life and death, the transformative period between the decline of outdated systems and the emergence of new paradigms.”

The palette of this body of work draws inspiration from Claude Monet’s late paintings. As Monet moved toward a purity of color and light in response to his waning eyesight, Moyer interprets this evolution as an investigation of the essential, a filtering that reduces visual language to its core elements. Through her unique approach, Moyer continues this exploration, using colour and light as the fundamental building blocks of abstraction.

The Large Payne series, an ongoing body of oil-on-panel paintings initiated in 2020, extends Moyer’s long-standing engagement with the effects of light. Evolving from her earlier Payne works on paper, which she began in 2017, these paintings are unified by a restrained palette dominated by Payne’s Gray—a colour that captures the fleeting glow of the “magic hour,” the brief moment between sunset and nightfall when light softens, and contrast intensifies. Reinforcing the sculptural nature of her work, Moyer’s tactile application of oil paint, creates surfaces that shift and transform as the viewer moves.

In 2024, Moyer was selected as the Dieu Donné Lab Grant Resident, a prestigious year-long program dedicated to advancing the art of handmade paper. Her residency resulted in a series of works composed of multiple layers of paper pulp, each featuring varying materials and hues. By manipulating the wet pulp through removal and layering techniques, Moyer constructed intricate compositions that were then pressed and dried, yielding richly textured and structurally complex works.

Concurrent with her exhibition at the gallery, the Hill Art Foundation will present,Woman with Holes, a survey exhibition spanning early dyed canvas works, a monumental stone painting and recent handmade paper works. Presented in dialogue with selections from the Hill Collection, the exhibition examines Moyer’s engagement with abstraction and places her work alongside artists including Robert Gober, Liz Glynn, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Isamu Noguchi, from whose sculpture the title of the show is derived. The exhibition opens on Thursday, May 1 from 5-7pm and will be on view through August 1, 2025. We hope you can visit both exhibitions.

Sam Moyer earned her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, DC, and her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, AL. Moyer’s work has been featured in national and international group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; the Bass Museum, Miami, FL; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; the Public Art Fund, New York, NY; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden, amongst others. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Morgan Library & Museum, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, among others. Moyer lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.