Perpetual painting

Magenta Plains is pleased to present Moira Dryer: Perpetual painting, a posthumous solo exhibition of works from 1986 to 1992.

So many conversations about Moira Dryer’s work center around the lasting relevance of painting, her painting. Peers, gallerists, curators, collectors, family, and friends who knew her personally during her brief life speak of her today with the same deep love and admiration, with a little smirk for her playful rebellion, as if she will walk in the room to say hello at any moment.

Both The perpetual painting (1988) and The ghost and the machine (1987) wink at this idea of longevity. Titles were an important part of Dryer’s practiced thinking and as many pages in her studio notebooks were taken over with found language collages and lists of possible titles. With an almost engrained sensitivity for the fragility of life, the artist supports the idea of the mind-body duality now colloquially and patronizingly referred to as “the ghost in the machine.” Pushing this just a bit further, as she actively pushed the paint in large loose waves over the surface of the panel, she titled the work, “the ghost and the machine,” clarifying that the two indeed coexist, asserting their autonomy. The wheel and arm imbedded in the top corner of the panel remember the life of the painter—the physicality of the stretched arms, the rotation of the heavy panel that created drips now running parallel to the floor in a ghostly defiance of gravity—who now is separated from the physical body at indefinite rest.

Painting has died a thousand deaths. To paint, especially when Dryer was hard at work, when conceptualism and expressionism were fiercely locked in debate, Dryer applied the idea of the ghost in the machine more broadly—conceptualism and expressionism were the mind-body duality that appears in all her work. She presented The Perpetual Painting as a conceptual double entendre asserting the endurance painting as if an infinite wave or a pulley system with an endless belt. Dryer’s work was serious. She was addressing real topics of art history and of her time. She was a great lover of Renaissance art and mathematics, decoration, and language, among so many other relevant interests. She also had a wry sense of humor. She poked holes, literally and figuratively, in the cohesive surfaces and images of her work, as in Untitled (1992); she gave cultural meaning and aesthetic value to mathematical concepts like shock in Culture shock (1990) and many of the drawings on view; and she poked fun at the idea of the artist’s hand in the work by representing fingerprint whorls (The fingerprint, 1987) and thumbprints impeding on the face of the painting as if to assert their hand (Untitled, 1990).

It is because of this deep commitment to thought and expression that Moira Dryer continues to feel ever-present and prescient. By approaching her paintings with plurality, they will forever be relevant and alive.