John Moore “After the Rain”

Hirschl & Adler

This event has ended.

Hirschl & Adler Modern presents After the Rain, a solo exhibition of thirteen recent paintings by John Moore. With these works, the artist reveals the vestiges of industry around his adopted-home state of Maine and places a marked emphasis on the landscape which seeks to reclaim them. Moore’s luminous handling of land, sky and water opens the space beyond his signature depictions of factory windows and bridges and, with this heightened atmosphere, recalls the rich tradition of American landscape painting. To assume these paintings are about the continuing decline of industry limits their reach. These paintings are about the beauty and quiet power of the true American landscape - one of cyclical growth and intervention between man and nature.

In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, Christopher Crosman delves deep into the conceptual and formal structure of John Moore’s work. Crosman focuses on Moore’s signature layering of time, space, and composite imagery from sites both real and imagined, as well as his embrace of Maine’s authentic beauty. The new paintings in After the Rain are steeped in the artist’s new-found sense of place in Maine, but do so through the artist’s characteristic sense of mystery and timelessness. Crosman perfectly encapsulates this innate sensibility towards painting:

Cultural and historical allusions aside, Moore is clearly interested in paintings that are simultaneously real and abstract and alive to meanings individual viewers can find within their own experience-how art touches and informs our sense of being in the world and what place means to each of us now and over time. This is what I believe Moore’s bridges and windows posit: linkages between past and present, familiarity and strangeness, rural and urban, idea and feeling. Moore’s paintings join with and extend a continuing American landscape tradition, its post-industrial denouement opening to different, newer, more complex, deeper realms of beauty and transformative promise. Moore’s art connects quiet intersections and passages of distance, time, and memory.

John Moore was born in St. Louis, MO in 1941. He received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis (1966) and an MFA from Yale University (1968). Over a career spanning forty years he has been twice-awarded by both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007, Moore was elected to the National Academy of Design and was given an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2010. He served as the Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania from 1999-2009 and has previously taught at Tyler School of Art and Boston University. Moore’s work can be found in public collections nationwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. The subject of numerous solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, the artist has been represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern since 1983. John Moore lives and works in Maine.