Exhibition News: Moskowitz at Peter Freeman (Mar 14-May 16)

Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades

curated by Dieter Schwarz

14 March – 16 May 2024

Opening reception Thursday, 14 March, 6–8pm

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Robert Moskowitz’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, curated by Dieter Schwarz, who writes: Robert Moskowitz has created an oeuvre that is painterly through and through, and at the same time possesses immense pictorial power. The selection of paintings and drawings in this exhibition makes it possible to trace some of Moskowitz’s motifs over an extended period of time.

In contrast to the imagery of Pop Art, Moskowitz’s images have a completely private character. Even the twin towers of the former World Trade Center, which he first painted in the late 1970s and revisited over the years, became a personal metaphor for him. Through his painterly treatment, Moskowitz reduces the image to its essential form and to its essential content, creating a particular physicality. This can be seen, for example, in the relationship between the image transformed into a silhouette to the color and format of the horizontally or vertically expanding picture surface. The image is embedded in it, waiting to be discovered by the viewer.

Moskowitz’s images possess a density and intensity that allows him to reproduce them in ever new forms over the years—be it on paper or on canvas. The subtle variations of medium—oil paint, pastel, graphite—and format express subtle variations of mood through the same image. In his studio, Moskowitz installed a large number of drawings, which mainly show iterations of the twin towers and the Flatiron Building. This wall of drawings, which is impressive due to the range of tonalities, has been reconstructed for the exhibition.

The room of paintings features a small selection of motifs: the Wrigley Building from Chicago, which Moskowitz painted from an advertising image, the Red Cross he glimpsed in a film with Bill Murray whom he admires, the Tsunami wave, and finally the man jumping into the depths from a mural in Pompeii. Moskowitz chose these images intuitively. In the course of his practice, which takes on obsessive traits through repetition and duration, both their physical presence and their enigmatic appearance become clearer. But the material beauty of the surfaces is only an attractive illusion because, as Moskowitz said in an interview, the images are existential: “what the picture is saying is not beautiful. It’s about being here.”