Moira Dryer: Paintings & Works on Paper

MOIRA DRYER: PAINTINGS & WORKS ON PAPER January 10 – February 7, 2016 | West Gallery | 195 Chrystie Street, NY, NY 10002  

11R (formerly Eleven Rivington) is pleased to inaugurate its newly constructed and expanded 195 Chrystie Street location with an exhibition of paintings and works on paper from the 1980s and early 1990s by the late Moira Dryer (1957 – 1992).  This is the second solo exhibition of Moira Dryer’s work at 11R, and it presents abstract paintings on wood panel, along with a selection of never before exhibited watercolors, gouaches and collages.  The show will include printed matter and past exhibition brochures, encouraging an in depth consideration of the artist and a fuller view of her practice.  

The exhibition presents work spanning Moira Dryer’s exhibition career, beginning with the small casein on wood Target Landscape, 1985, painted a year before her first solo exhibition.  Two shaped paintings – including the instantly iconic The Debutante, 1987 – highlight the artist’s interest in contradicting the physicality and object-like quality of taut, painted plywood; in both works, Dryer thrusts the picture plane towards the space of the viewer, dramatically altering our understanding of each work’s surface and support.  

A selection of works on paper – shown here for the first time – underscores the deliberateness of Dryer’s methods, the offhand, yet specific touch of her paint application, and her pictorial considerations.  The works gathered here include painted and cut paper; collage; watercolors; and gouaches.  The work Untitled, 1989, is a cool gray field framed by the artist’s dark thumbprints. 

Moira Dryer was born in 1957, in Toronto, and moved to NY in the late 1970s to study at the School of Visual Arts, where she graduated with honors in 1981.  During her early years in the city, Dryer was a student of Elizabeth Murray; she would subsequently be a studio assistant to Murray as well as to Julian Schnabel, while also working freelance as a prop and set maker for local theaters.  Dryer had her first solo exhibition in 1986 at John Good Gallery, NY, followed by two solos at Mary Boone Gallery, NY, and two exhibitions with Mario Diacono, Boston, among others.  During her lifetime, she had solo museum exhibitions at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, in 1987, and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1989.  In 1993, a year after the artist succumbed to a five-year battle with cancer at age 34, a solo Projects exhibition of Dryer’s paintings was presented at The Museum of Modern Art, NY.  Dryer’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Museum of Modern Art, NY.