ARTFORUM: Danny Moynihan

 

“In Praise of Limestone” is the artist’s New York debut and his first solo exhibition in more than twenty years. Moynihan, the son of renowned artists Rodrigo Moynihan and Anne Dunn, was a graduate of London’s Slade School of Fine Art in the 1980s and came up alongside many of the Young British Artists (or YBAs) of the ’90s. For most of his career he’s been obsessed with the stark antipodes of physical existence: putrefaction and immutability. He spent decades making virtuoso still lifes of rotting fruit as well as heavily layered oils of the same half dozen or so rocks that he’d lugged back to his studio from a field in southern France. In his current show we see a surrealistic marriage of deterioration and permanence: Stone dissolves into frangible flesh; caves give birth to slithery hybridized life-forms; cliff faces split open into misshapen mouths and lips; countless eyeballs stare blankly from pitted volcanic promontories. 

 

Danny Moynihan’s epic paintings are amalgamations of landscape and figuration; they obscure a line invented in the nineteenth century to separate humanity from its place in the natural world. In The Hunt 2023–24, torso-like forms recline beneath the ominous weight of towering cliffs. Between them is an explosion of exquisitely impastoed blood, bone, teeth, and horns. Of course, this is just my reading; nothing is literal in any of Moynihan’s new works. Only suggestions of a narrative are offered, like the river of images just out of reach after waking from a nightmare.

 

“In Praise of Limestone” is the artist’s New York debut and his first solo exhibition in more than twenty years. Moynihan, the son of renowned artists Rodrigo Moynihan and Anne Dunn, was a graduate of London’s Slade School of Fine Art in the 1980s and came up alongside many of the Young British Artists (or YBAs) of the ’90s. For most of his career he’s been obsessed with the stark antipodes of physical existence: putrefaction and immutability. He spent decades making virtuoso still lifes of rotting fruit as well as heavily layered oils of the same half dozen or so rocks that he’d lugged back to his studio from a field in southern France. In his current show we see a surrealistic marriage of deterioration and permanence: Stone dissolves into frangible flesh; caves give birth to slithery hybridized life-forms; cliff faces split open into misshapen mouths and lips; countless eyeballs stare blankly from pitted volcanic promontories. 

Flashes of Gustave Courbet, El Greco, Anselm Kiefer, and Chaïm Soutine show up in the work—Moynihan borrows from art history to help contain his grotesque but compelling visions. The rain over the superbly painted precipices in Spring,2022–24, suggests the vertical streaks shredding Francis Bacon’s Pope Innocent X, while the landscape of geometric shapes in Kraken, 2023–24, with its forbidding canyon disappearing between two thigh-like walls, hints at Georgia O’Keeffe. Moynihan’s works are grand paeans to painting and the ancient existential mysteries that haunt the recesses of a vivid imagination.