Artist: John Moore

Hirschl & Adler Modern presents Poetry of Place, a solo exhibition of thirteen new oil paintings by John Moore. This is the artist’s fifteenth solo exhibition with Hirschl & Adler Modern, marking nearly forty years of representation with the gallery.

Moore’s is a unique brand of realism infused with artifice. In invented worlds he juxtaposes that which is directly observed with things remembered or imagined, revealing multiple layers of time, space, and experience. Though completed in his studio in Belfast, Maine, where he now resides full-time, the paintings’ organic, industrial, and urban elements are drawn from memories and direct observation, both past and present, from Moore’s working-class upbringing in St. Louis to a career spent living in New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia. The artist has noted that everything in his paintings “is real…, or should have been real, or could be real.”

In Red Sky at Dusk, 2023, the formal grid of his former Philadelphia studio window frames a fiery Maine sky, illuminating a view of the Front Street shipyard in Belfast as seen from a footbridge. Moore’s windows often serve as “portals” into a world where elements are carefully placed not only for their visual impact, but for their suggestive power as well. In Two Bridges, 2022, time and space collapse as wild lilies dominate the reflected view of the Memorial Bridge, a 1921 monument to World War I veterans spanning the Passagassawakeag River, visible from Moore’s front yard. In Parkside, 2024, a brick building in Bangor is represented by its shimmery reflection in a canal edged by a community garden. The garden, canal, and structure exist, somewhere, but not just as Moore depicts them, and the artist’s use of dizzying perspective heightens this alternate and mesmerizing reality.

As in past exhibitions, every detail large and small is equally important, exquisitely rendered, purposeful, and balanced. However, the paintings presented in Poetry of Place feel more personal than ever. Intense skies and sublime views may evoke the great historical landscape painters, but here one also senses changes, the passage of time, and transitions. At his best, Moore offers the viewer visual poetry, eliciting a concentrated awareness of experiences, thoughts, and emotions.

John Moore was born in St. Louis, MO in 1941. He received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis (1966) and an MFA from Yale University (1968). Over a career spanning forty years he has been twice awarded by both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007, Moore was elected to the National Academy of Design and was given an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2010. He served as the Chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania from 1999-2009 and previously taught at Tyler School of Art and Boston University. Moore’s work can be found in public collections nationwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. The subject of numerous solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, the artist has been represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern since 1983. John Moore lives and works in Maine.

This exhibition is accompanied by a 24-page digital catalogue with 13 full-color illustrations. It was also planned to coincide with the forthcoming publication of John Moore: Portals, a comprehensive scholarly monograph published by Marshall Wilkes and edited by Carl Little, with contributions by Christina Kee, Suzette McAvoy, John R. Stomberg, Rosanna Warren, Vincent Katz, John Yau, and Geoffrey Young.