SAM MOYER

Education

Sam Moyer holds a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C. (2005) and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2007).

Artworks

Moyer’s early works foreshadow her longstanding concern with materiality, labour, and the production of painting. In her first solo exhibition Night Moves, held at Brooklyn’s Cleopatra’s in 2008, the artist showed sculptural paintings made from stretcher bars wrapped in mover’s blankets. Moyer had come to notice the physical quality of the furniture coverings while helping fellow artist Mika Tajima with her installations of paintings in wooden storage racks.

Experimentation with Materials

Over the years, Sam Moyer has departed from mover’s blankets to incorporate slabs of stone and metal sheets into sculptural, wall-hung works that resemble paintings. In works such as Untitled (2012), she used ink and bleach on canvas to create various markings—wrinkled, straight, and rippling—shifting in colour from soft to dark grey. Pieces of marble are cut into irregular and geometric shapes in the large-scale MDF panel work Cherry blossoms fall on half eaten bun (2017), which also features a slanted corner, disrupting the conventional, rectangular shape of a painting.

Tone, Moyer’s 2021 solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, saw the artist introduce plaster-coated canvas to her more intimately sized paintings. Daisy Chain juxtaposes a vertical arrangement of marble pieces on canvas, which has been painted over with wide sweeps of white-grey in horizontal and vertical directions, while an abstracted Pea Pod rests on a background of blue (both 2021). The works in Tone were in part inspired by the seawall near Moyer’s home in Long Island Sound, which she finds to be ‘a beautiful time capsule of the specific place’ as she told Document in 2021.

Public Work

Doors for Doris (2021), a sculpture commissioned by New York’s Public Art Fund and named after its founder Doris C. Freedman, continues Moyer’s exploration of form and materiality. For the tall monoliths reminiscent of her paintings, the artist sourced stone and marble from both New York and elsewhere, mirroring the city’s vibrant and diverse culture.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions include Tone, Sean Kelly, New York (2021); Sam Moyer: Doors for Doris, Public Art Fund, Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York (2020); Flowers, Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles (2019); Sam Moyer: Many Moons, rodolphe janssen, Brussels (2018); and Brick Window, 56 Henry Gallery, New York (2017).

Selected group exhibitions include Shapes, Alexander Berggruen, New York (2021); Artist for New York, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2020); Hiato, SIM Galeria São Paulo (2019); Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018); Crooked Bazaar, PROYECTOS MONCLOVA, Mexico City (2017); ASSISTED, Kavi Gupta, Chicago (2015); and Thread Lines, The Drawing Center, New York (2014).

Ocula | 2021