Donna Moylan: Recent Paintings
January 16 – February 21, 2025
Reception: Thursday, January 16th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
 

Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Donna Moylan. This is the artist's first solo show with the gallery.

The paintings in this exhibition were all finished over the last year at the artist’s studio in Kinderhook, NY. There, overlooking an expansive meadow inhabited with wildlife, the artist combines her pastoral surroundings with references to ancient cultures that she absorbed during her many years living in Italy. In doing so, she combines her personal (and our collective) past with the present. A lifted background from a Thomas Cole landscape or a figure from a Giorgione painting are overlayed with colorful, sinewy abstractions and ghost-like figures. The resulting metaphysical compositions share an affinity with artists ranging from Charles Burchfield to David Salle and Peter Doig.

In writing about this body of work, Richard Milazzo describes what he calls Moylan’s vision of the “fiercely sublime.” That is to say, a juxtaposition of the sublime beauty of the arcadian landscape with the ferocity of color and figures that are “always on the threshold of appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, in a constant and dynamic state of transformation – abstract and momentary, yet seemingly asserting the eternal values of timelessness.” [1]

Poet, essayist and gallerist Mario Diacono writes of this work: “Abstractions of nature, dream-like supernatural events, art history evocations combine to create a unique multilayering of images in Donna Moylan’s paintings, a coalition of pictorial strangers who feel perfectly at home on her canvases as if they had always lived there. The feathery softness of Moylan’s brushwork further unifies as visions the diverse members of her composite representations, always basking in a tenderness of light.”

Donna Moylan (b. 1950, Boston, MA) was born in Boston and moved to Rome at the age of 19 before moving to New York City in 1992. Moylan has been the subject of numerous reviews including those in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, ArtForum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. She has had over 25 solo exhibitions in Rome, Italy, New York City, Boston, Houston and in Chatham and Hudson, NY. Her work is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Cleveland Center for the Arts, Cleveland, OH; the New York Public Library, New York and La Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy to name a few. Donna Moylan lives and works in Brooklyn and in Kinderhook, NY.

Donna Moylan: Recent Paintings will be on view from January 16 – February 21, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 16th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.

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[1] Richard Milazzo, “Donna Moylan and the Elephant in the Room,” 2024.