On View
Peter Freeman Gallery
Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades
March 14–May 16, 2024
New York
In this imaginatively orchestrated show, Zurich-based curator and author Dieter Schwarz has creatively assembled a huge wall of Robert Moskowitz’s drawings, reproducing verbatim the arrangement that had been posted on the artist’s studio wall. It’s an enlightening and moving tribute to Moskowitz, who died just days after the opening of the show.
The actual studio wall, located in his loft, allows for a glimpse into the psyche, techniques, and art experiences of Moskowitz. The drawings address the nature of design, painting, and architecture, with images, most notably of landmark structures such as the Wrigley Building in Chicago, the Flatiron Building in New York, and of course the Twin Towers. These last are captured before as well as after the attack and formally bear testimony to the impact of 9/11 on Moskowitz and his neighborhood. Not surprisingly, we find here many iterations of the towers. And we also see other structures—doors and windows, corners of rooms, and stairs—all in their simple rectangular shapes denoting home and place. The images are so flat, like billboards and advertisements, but they are not like Pop images. Rather, they are pictures with psychological depth being impressed on our minds. They contribute not only to a portrait of the artist and his preoccupations, but they also provide a snapshot—or many—of a particular time, sealed in flat geometric shapes.
In the large rear gallery space hang powerful paintings, notable for their rich surfaces, whose depth we sense more than see. They tell a different story from the drawings. These canvases reveal an artist with a strong sense of his place in the art world of his time and speak of a confidence in his style and practice. It most often evokes Clyfford Still and the exterior landscape but also the flat interior landscapes of Minimalist artists and designers, unembellished and mostly non-referential. He has united the associations of Abstract Expressionists like Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb in Minimal conceptions showing how they built and unbuilt their work.
His quintessential expression uniting mind and mood and subject is strikingly affecting in his window-shade series, most moving in the manner of film noir. The readymade, often stained shades, with their nuanced surfaces, he told Linda Shearer in an interview, allowed him to think about “what they mean—what they are. The realization that I was focusing on an image was perhaps my real break with Abstract Expressionism.” It seals off the view of the external world and at the same time secures it and leaves us to shape our own.
Moskowitz, who was early on trained as a tradesman at the Mechanics Union, knew how to convey structure. At the same time, he could be unexpectedly playful, even ironic, as in his painting of an Art Deco-style figure of Atlas holding up a glass globe and his large painting Red Cross (1987), showing a black cross on a white ground. Also, jarringly witty and nearly of-the-moment is his Cave Painting from 1993, featuring a digital smiley face set creepily in a flat black field beside a jagged wall of Clyfford Still-like rock.
Moskowitz’s spaces are unmodulated for the most part. He was able to lock himself into a room conceived with the solidity of acrylic paint. He built interior spaces with right angles and the illusion of corners and elevations. The surfaces can appear close to seamless. It’s ultimately Moskowitz’s own architectural domain nestled in his mind: warm, embracing, and claustrophobic.
As an off-stage adjunct to the Freeman exhibition, there is the enlightening show An Extended Family of Painters: Hermine Ford, Robert Moskowitz, Jack Tworkov, Janice Biala, and Daniel Brustlein, at JJ Murphy Gallery on Stanton street. The Murphy show serves as a fascinating counterpoint to the one at Freeman’s, highlighting the work of Moskowitz’s wife Hermine Ford, and Ford’s parents, Brustlein and Biala, as well as her uncle, the influential abstract painter Jack Tworkov, who was a close friend of Moskowitz’s. Together, this family provides a stunning overview of the range of painting being made in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.