Lawrence Markey Inc.

Robert Moskowitz Recent Work

at Lawrence Markey
February 1–March 15, 2003

Lawrence Markey is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition of recent work by Robert Moskowitz. This will be Robert Moskowitz’s third solo exhibition at Lawrence Markey Gallery, and will consist of new oil paintings and pastel drawings on paper.

Since the early 1970’s, Moskowitz has assembled and mined a particular vocabulary of motifs; among these are iconic architectural images of the Empire State Building, the World Trade Towers, and the Flatiron Building, and images from the history of art derived from the works of such artists as Brancusi, Rodin, and Giacometti. This exhibition will introduce two new images to Moskowitz’s repertory.

The pastels in the exhibition were executed during Moskowitz’s stay at the American Academy In Rome in the spring of 2002. The art of Rome provided a particularly fecund territory for Moskowitz, who assimilated the following images: the almost touching hands of God and Adam, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, and the diving figure from the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, which depicts a man in mid-dive from life to death. The pastels are richly layered to a velvet-matte finish and reveal the artist’s hand in vestiges of fingerprints and smudges.

Whether in pastel or oil, Moskowitz’s new work continues to explore his signature reductive style; high contrast silhouettes, repeated in differently scaled versions, linking the past and present. Moskowitz maintains his position at the juncture of representation and abstraction, infusing his chosen imagery with perhaps ambiguous, but decidedly emotive content. Moskowitz filters well-known images through his imagination, and somehow, makes them his own.