Moira Dryer
Thirty Years Later
By Gwenaël Kerlidou, April 24, 2025
Perpetual Painting, Magenta Plains, New York
Moira Dryer, The Perpetual Painting, 1988, Casein and lacquer on auto parts and wood, 36 x 83 3/4 x 4 1/2 in. Image courtesy of Magenta Plains, New York, photo by Object Studies.
Moira Dryer passed away thirty-three years ago in 1992, after a now legendary meteoric career which brought her from obscurity to being represented by Mary Boone -the hippest gallery in Soho at the time- in less than ten years. Her untimely death from cancer seemed to echo the earlier disappearance of Eva Hesse in 1970, also at age 34, and similarly at the top of her game in the New York art world. As with any young promising artist’s premature death (think of Robert Smithson, who died in 1973 at 35, or of Blinky Palermo, dead at 33 in 1977), the question remains as to how their work would have evolved had they lived longer. With recognition, would they have followed a path of safe market-induced repetition, or one of more commercially risky evolution? Would their work have changed dramatically, and if so, would they be forgotten today?
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A small survey of Dryer’s work on two floors at Magenta Plains currently gives us a chance to revisit and reappraise, with the distance of time, a body of work which seems to have been bypassed by most recent discourses on painting, perhaps because it was assumed to have been defined once and for all by the critical discourse of her time.
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The timing of her work’s emergence in New York, in the late nineteen eighties, was such that it was inevitably caught in the web of the different debates on Post-Modernity sweeping the art world at that time.
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To set the stage, the rise of the Neo-Geos (around Peter Halley, Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton, and Haim Steinbach) in the late 1980s coincided with a string of exhibitions organized by the curatorial team of Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. Both the Neo-Geo and Collins/Milazzo’s post-modern critical discourse were based on a somewhat superficial reading of a few French poststructuralists (mostly Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault), revolving around notions of appropriation, citation, simulacrum and irony, and seemed to nurture a kind of secret fascination for the object of their critique. Both focused largely on how Abstraction could define itself in relation to “the social”, a concept never fully clarified then.
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In retrospect, it is significant that Dryer never ended up being associated with these fairly programmatic discourses. Part of the enduring attraction of her work comes precisely from the fact that it doesn’t easily fit with any of the narratives of that time. Looking at her work thirty years later gives us a measure of how much risk-taking and experimentation in abstract painting have lately retreated to the safety of historically predetermined codes and formulas.
Her background as a set designer for the Mabou Mines Theater Company might have been foundational in her approach to Painting as a kind of re-staging of the figures of representation.
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In a 1988 interview with Klaus Ottman, Dryer repeatedly talked about her work as theatrical props and on a different occasion she also stated: "I'm beginning to see these paintings as performers. It is a theatre, and the pieces are performing...” which helps frame the question of the relationship of her work to representation as props or performers, or props as performers, and by extension representation as performance.
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Let’s take a slightly longer view and follow that theatrical lead all the way back to the 18th century and to Diderot who first articulated the notion of the tableau (a word which will be later equated with a painting in English) as a particularly striking situation on stage, a “scene”, using theater to define painting and vice-versa. And then, to better understand the connection between Theater and Representation, let’s bring in the French word for a theatrical performance (un spectacle, une représentation). Perhaps we can now get a better sense of how representation, the performative, and the theatrical are so closely intertwined in painting.
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Michael Fried’s interesting coinage of the “Absorption and Theatricality” dichotomy (in his 1980 book of the same name) might have been controversial, but it puts us on the right track. When he advocated for tautological self-referentiality as Absorption (a quality embodied by the Color Field painters he defended) and defined Phenomenology as Theatricality (a criticism he directed towards Minimalism in general), he might not have been interested to delve into the philosophical ramifications of his construct, but he was spot on about its need to be articulated. There is indeed a paradigm shift there, but the terms of its enunciations are not necessarily as incompatible and mutually exclusive as he may have led us to believe. Dryer’s work is a good example of a midpoint position managing the extremes as either a kind of self-absorbed theatricality or of theatrical absorption.
Moira Dryer, The Fingerprint, 1987, Casein and acrylic on wood, 48 x 63 1/8 x 3 in.
Image courtesy of Magenta Plains, New York, photo by Object Studies.
Moira Dryer, Untitled, 1990, Acrylic on wood, 19 1/2 x 26 1/2 in.
Image courtesy of Magenta Plains, New York, photo by Object Studies.
There is, for example, a not-so-oblique connection between Dryer’s work and Giorgio De Chirico’s, which will, no doubt, make our formalist friends squirm. Not necessarily a link to Surrealism per se, as they might have feared, but to de Chirico’s insistence on Painting’s space of representation as an empty stage, empty of actors, but full of props; A train (bad pun intended) of thoughts which might also prompt one to recall Luigi Pirandello’s famous 1921 play, at the beginning of Surrealism, titled “Six Characters in Search of an Author”, where another fundamental tenet of classical theater is missing. In that light, and not just because quite a few of her paintings evoke images of theatrical backdrops, it might not be too far-fetched to see Dryer’s paintings as an assembly of props/performers in search of a scenario/narrative, staged in the gallery/museum as a space of representation.
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And then, to continue on that same thread a bit further, if, as has been argued, Roland Barthes proclamation of the death of the author also announced the birth of the reader, could we possibly extend the proposition to the advent of Minimalism, with the disappearance of the painter as such, the withdrawal of the artist’s hand, and the displacement of its role as conceptual designer, with execution left to industrial processes and fabrication delegated to outside resources, simultaneously prompting the birth and the constitution of “the viewer” as spectator as we know it today and the introduction of the artist as first significant spectator of his/her own work and of its developments.
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Alternating strategies of presentation and representation, Dryer’s work exploited this ambiguous combination of distancing and of very personal proximity, of an almost intimate subject matter -I’m thinking here of the Signature and Fingerprint paintings, conflating distance and proximity in the same de-dramatized gesture. Her distancing strategies included the use of thin and flat casein paint, of cutouts, incisions, and insertions of found objects in or on the support, as well as flirting with sculptural issues. There is in her work an equal uneasiness with modernist precepts of linear, progressive, formally coherent evolution as much as with postmodern ironic postures. Instead, she favored an absorbed, inward, interiorized theatricality, but as if watched from a spectator’s safe distance. By comparison, consider, for example, the theatricality of Thomas Scheibitz, a Berlin-based painter who was recently showing at the Tonya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea, and who also mines the connections between painting and theater, abstraction and figuration, but in a much more rhetorical way.
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To be sure, theatricality was always part of painting since the beginning and has been a staple of Modernity. The best example of it might still be Marcel Duchamp’s “Etant Donné …” with its elaborate staging and its positioning of the viewer as voyeur. More recently, staging has also taken center stage (last bad pun -promised) with installation and performance art. Another example which, I think, might be helpful to bring up in her case is that of Joseph Beuys and his use of sculptural props (sleds or coyotes) as therapeutic symbols, with the utopian purpose of healing society from all its ills. There is a similar sense in Dryer’s work that painting functions on a therapeutic level. Maybe it helped her cope with her dire medical prognostics. Maybe it can now help us deal with our grim political situation.
That particular dimension of pathos in her work may remind us of the relationship of Abstraction and Empathy that Wilhelm Worringer introduced in his 1912 book of the same title, at the beginning of Abstraction, when it was widely misinterpreted as an argument in favor of Wassily Kandinsky’s transition from Expressionism to Abstraction. If her personal story is nowhere to be seen literally in her work, it is subtly infused, transcended, and sublimated in each painting. Whether she intended it or not, today we can’t help but project a kind of poignant, subjective strain running through her work, which seems to connect it back to German Romanticism and to its fascination for the unknown as the sublime.
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There is indeed a sense in this show that painting is perpetual and constantly in the throes of remaking itself into a new exercise of symbolic exorcising of the unknown. But also, to confirm Harold Bloom’s intuition in “The Anxiety of Influence,” where he posits that young poets are bound to misread the work of their predecessors, more simply that painting will always outlive us in the gaze of a new, misreading beholder.
Moira Dryer, Perpetual Painting, installation view 2025. Image courtesy of Magenta Plains, New York, photo by Object Studies.