Acrylic on canvas
90 x 78 in.
Acrylic on canvas
88 x 108 in.
Decades
“After decades as a known presence in the global art world, Donna Moylan has at long last been recognized as a modern master. Trained in Boston, Moylan moved to Rome in the 1970s where she entered the city’s charged art circles and developed a practice grounded in myth, metaphor, and shifting narratives. This experience, coupled with the gallery she exhibited at—led to her misassociation with the Italian Transavanguardia which Moylan has insisted as always having been “outside of”—on account of being both a woman and an American. Her current studio in Kinderhook, NY, offers a space where light, landscape, and memory converge and shift. Moylan has said, “Deep culture is similar to wild nature because the effect of each is so strong,” and her paintings channel that energy—figures built from scribbled tangles, fragments of architecture, flickers of light and matter that resist resolution—subtle, layered, and unmistakably her own.”
-Bill Arning
Donna Moylan was born in Boston. At 19 she moved to Rome, Italy, where she lived for 23 years. Upon returning to the United States in the early 90’s, she settled in New York City. Over the course of her career, she has had more than 25 solo exhibitions: in European cities such as Rome, Milan, Naples, and Amsterdam; in the U.S., she has shown in New York City, Boston, Los Angeles and Houston, as well as in upstate New York.
Her work is included in many private collections and in the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Public Library, La Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, and in the Museo Civico di Siracusa.
Donna lives and works in Brooklyn and in Kinderhook, NY.
From when it was first proposed many months ago, this exhibition at Time and Space Limited in Hudson gave me a charge. I admire Linda and Claudia and I was flattered that artist colleagues of mine had suggested my work for a show at TSL.
It seemed to me that TSL’s big gallery space called for large paintings and the idea came to me to show some of the very big works that I have made over the years, that so far have not been exhibited in any city in the United States.
Now that my career spans many decades I thought I’d call the show “Decades”. As I unrolled the paintings to measure them for stretchers I was a little surprised to see that my own work hasn’t changed as much as I imagined over the 35 years this group represents. I thought I’d been on a rather linear “progression”; instead I could see the course of my work looked more like a spiral, looping back over time as it developed.
-Donna Moylan