Artist: Tony Moore

The Painting Center presents Sculpture. Homage to Brice Marden, a solo exhibition by Tony Moore in the Project Room. Tony Moore’s practice is concerned with the relationship of humanity and nature. He believes in an expanded concept of “Nature” which embodies all existence, both the seen and unseen, socio-political events, daily occurrences, as well as private intuitions that are made concrete through creative action.Hi s objects are places of remembrance where multiplicities of associations take place. Most recently these have been concerned with issues of the human condition.

Within the solo exhibition, “Tony Moore: Sculpture. Homage to Brice Marden” we observe three large ceramic sculptures, each weighing approximately 180 lbs. which were wood-fired in his Japanese style Anagama kiln. While the rhythmically undulating clay surfaces may appear to be modelled by hand, they are actually made (beaten or paddled) from a forcefully compressed mound of wet clay by energetically striking their mass with a textured 4-foot piece of lumber. Just as a painting may be comprised of brush strokes, these sculptures are shaped by the displacement of their mass by rhythmically struck blows or strikes. In this way the artist responds to the shifting pile of clay as it is gradually transformed before his eyes and within his physical action around its perimeter. In this sense, its creation is an event within a certain moment of time. Everything that is channeled within this moment refers to the past, both of personal histories and archetypal precedents, the current moment of conception, emotional expression, and towards future aspiration.

Although essentially abstract, or of abstracted topology (rocks, mountains, terrestrial landscapes or human contour), Moore construes them to be of spirit in nature.

While titles evoke the memory of the celebrated artist Brice Marden, his long illness and eventual physical demise (death), the artist insists that this body of work is not about Brice Marden (who’s courage to keep painting within the face of impending death he considers “heroic”), but because of him. The artist therefore reinforces his own, and our own fortitude of will, to persevere, to advance our human lineage and to wrestle with this material and spiritual plane of existence, making manifest moments of truth.

Tony Moore is an English-American sculptor and painter represented in international museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Greenville Museum, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Art Museum of the U. of Memphis and ASU Art Museum, US and the Yorkshire Museum and Derby Museum, UK. He received an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and is the recipient of prestigious awards, including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, CAPS Grant and Sally and Milton Avery Fellowship. In 1998, after 25 years of making sculptures and paintings in New York City, Moore relocated his home and studio to the scenic Hudson River Valley near Cold Spring, NY where on a mountain top property he built a spacious studio, gallery and Japanese style Anagama-Noborigama wood-fire kiln. His unique ceramic sculptures are fired in the kiln during weeklong communal events.