Betty Cuningham Gallery Presents Gordon Moore: Paintings & Photo-Emulsion Drawings

On Thursday December 8, 2011, Betty Cuningham Gallery will open an exhibition of new paintings and photo-emulsion drawings by Gordon Moore. This will be the third solo exhibition for the artist at the Gallery.

The current group of large scale paintings further develops the abstracted format and reduced palette of the works exhibited in Moore's previous shows. Notably, these new paintings reflect the artist's interest in photography, positing illusionistic space next to drawn space. Moore combines three or more distinct spaces within a single canvas with drawn lines that vary from deliberate to random. Moore describes himself as an empiricist and the paintings reveal an abstract but very tangible world.

The works on paper in this exhibition are, as the title implies, ink and acrylic on photo-emulsion paper. Here the tangible meets the abstract as the incidental photograph of a broken umbrella or a bent coat hanger converse with the drawn lines and the painted areas.

Born in Cherokee, IA, Gordon Moore received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970 and then went on to receive his MFA from Yale University in 1972. Soon after completing his graduate studies, Moore received his first solo exhibition at Cuningham Ward in New York. He has received numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment for the Arts-Visual Artists Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Painting, the Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation Award in Painting, the Academy Award in Art from the Nation Academy of Arts and Letters and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. Moore's work can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; General Electric Corporation, East Cleveland, OH and the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, Champaign, IL.

The current exhibition will include seven large paintings (82 x 56 inches), six to eight smaller paintings (40 x 30 inches) and several works on paper. The show will remain on view through February 11, 2012.