3. Danny Moynihan at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York
After graduating from London’s Slade School of Fine Art in 1977, Danny Moynihan had a promising profession as a painter, exhibiting in London and Los Angeles before taking a hiatus from showing to pursue curatorial, film, and writing projects. The child of two British artists, Moynihan had been around art long before starting a creative career. Initiating a series of cave paintings after moving to New York in 2016, the series slowly evolved to incorporate fleshy body parts, abnormal animals, bones, and teeth. Taking Cezanne’s masterful paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire (an area in the South of France that the young Moynihan had grown up around ) as his point of departure for each of his surreal landscapes, he used the serene setting as his primordial mud.
The recent paintings in the exhibition “In Praise of Limestone” (the title comes from a W.H. Auden poem) capsulize Moynihan’s extensive knowledge of art into a powerful series of mythological canvases. Rock formations morph into mounds of flesh, prehistoric beasts, and corporal remains. Layered in various degrees of expressive and refined brushwork, his visceral landscapes attract and hold the eye while a rush of art historical references flashes through the viewer’s mind. Highly original yet richly referential, Moynihan’s otherworldly paintings seem as old as time—most likely because it’s time that, in reality, he’s capturing on canvas.
Read full article here
