Moira Dryer: Destiny Fulfilled at Magenta Plains

“Moira Dryer: Perpetual Painting”, Magenta Plains, NY, installation view.

By EDWARD WAISNIS April 14, 2025
 

I’m beginning to see these paintings as performers. It is a theatre, and the pieces are performing…The pieces evolve from a very personal, emotional, point, but then they become entities in themselves. I give them life and then they become their own.
                        –Moira Dryer *

Fittingly, given her ties to the stage †, Moira Dryer maintained a studio in Times Square. With beautification bestowed shortly after her untimely death, at age thirty-five in 1992, Moira Dryer was elevated to the state of painter’s painter at a time when a seismic shift was occurring in the art world. A Canadian who began her career as a set designer/builder, where she picked up skills that would inform her practice materially as well as figuratively. Reliance on idiosyncratic mediums (casein) strategies (unconventional substrates and installation nuance) as well as the introduction of unconventional materials and the incorporation of hardware were all a result of the experience.

With respect to casein,‡ it is paramount to the look of Dryer’s work, producing matte surfaces with flatness akin to gouache. Logically, this can be traced to her designing days where the substance is de rigueur to the trade. The fact that she made it her own and elevated it into a canon ruled over by the revered oil is one of her many accomplishments in the field of serious painting.

“Moira Dryer: Perpetual Painting”, Magenta Plains, NY, installation view

Coming up with second wave feminism, incorporation of the body with the birth of performance–physical, dramaturgical, and musical–and at a time when painting was outré, all while battling against theoretical and practical concerns that were absorbing all of the oxygen, Dryer was amongst a coterie of artist’s who did not see the need to abandon expressive means and materials. Pat Steir, Joan Snyder, Susan Rothenberg, Ross Bleckner (a close, and personal, friend who was riding a parallel rail of painting) and her one-time teacher (at SVA) and employer (she was a studio assistant §) Elizabeth Murray, amongst others were those who rallied and went on to make significant marks.

Dryer has the distinction of being (along with the painters previously cited) crucial to the cause of re-establishing painting by offering strategies to get out of the corner that Minimalism and Conceptualism had driven modernism to.

A pivotal exhibition, that set Dryer on her way, was her second show at the John Good Gallery in 1988. Not only has this iteration of the gallery become something of a downtown legend, but one has to remember the ambience it was part of. For this was the beginning of the molting of SoHo, from urban an pioneering former industrial wasteland–a hospitable wasteland there for the plucking, a sedate sophisticated bohemia–into a black car-infested boutique-lined enclave. Dusty undeveloped lofts the had been sweat shops and warehouse space, complete with creaky crooked splintered floors, could still be found for relatively cheap fixture fees and rent.

That John Good gallery exposure led directly to Dryer’s ascent to the halls of Mary Boone, that most tony of galleries tailored to suit the ascendent age of the Yuppies. Boone managed to parlay invaluable connections from her position at the famed Bykert Gallery, together with her astute read of the winds of change, adopting the Madison Avenue/Rodeo Drive flavor invading the neighborhood into her showrooms. This short, but intense, rise was capped by Dryer’s influential Projects room exhibition at MoMA.¶
 

Moira Dryer, “The Perpetual Painting”, 1988, casein and lacquer on auto parts and wood, 36 x 83 3/4 x 4 1/2 inches

The current exhibition, installed over two floors, joins the highly-regarded showings of Dryer’s works in the years subsequent to her passing. The namesake work here, The Perpetual Painting, of 1988, is predominated by an intense crimson field to which is attached a pulley and belt assembly. The self-generating implication, provided by the title, can be identified in a visual correlation of the wavering lines that hold the top and bottom edges of the panel and pull off the effect of having been derived (driven by; unfurled) by the incorporated cogs. The infernal machine aspects are kept in check by the poetics of execution and touch.

The Ghost and the Machine, 1987, with a title appearing to be a nod to the intellectual tome penned by the survivor of the Stalin regime, Arthur Koestler.# In essence the book is a thesis that lays out an argument for a short-circuit in the psyche being responsible for mankind’s ills. Dryer absorbs the signposts, morphing them into a deus ex machine, complete with antique whirligig crank insert. The gray and white strokes, applied with a lazy meandering wrist, portend as wafts of smoke that are attempting to coalesce whilst shrouding the device with the titular apparition.

Moira Dryer, “The Ghost and the Machine”, 1987, casein on wood, 96 x 49 1/2 x 6 inches

Big Mother, 1988, where the application of the scalloped edge–one of Dryer’s recurring motifs–is another harking to her experience in the theater, resulting in an the effect of turning the whole affair into a rendition of a proscenium.

Dryer is on record denying any cooperation between what have been referred to as her prop pieces with Richard Serra’s works that share that moniker. While there is no inkling of purposeful hedging, there is evidence that Dryer genuflected to both his Prop and his Corner pieces with a fondness cum admiration.
 

Moira Dryer, “The Fingerprint” 1987, casein and acrylic on wood, 48 x 63 1/8 x 3 inches

The Fingerprint, 1987, deploying pareidolia by way of a ghostly ovoid–the vestiges of the digit imprint identified in the title?–leaning into mise en abyme. Capturing a wavering gossamer curtain with of one of the the most haunting transitions of color (literally unreproducible) that one is likely to come across. The whole thing is anchored by four incoherent dark squares that sit in the outside corners, perhaps attempting to contain the energy field they bracket.
 

Moira Dryer, “Culture Shock”, 1990, casein on wood, 46 x 48 inches

A masterwork amongst a range of works that run the gamut from highly interesting to great, Culture Shock, 1990 reeks of a work that the artist must have found self-satisfaction with. Denying the impulse to read the pattern as worthy of a Missoni fabric, one can not deny the retinal satisfaction and the wallowing resonance found in the seismic convulsions laid down in creamy diluted striations of white and alizarin crimson.
 

Moira Dryer, “two panels, blue-green, wavy”, 1987-88, casein on wood, Each panel: 79 1/4 x 51 x 2 1/2 inches

The preference for organic stripes carries throughout Dryer’s practice. Often in preferred contemplative viridescent shades that call up aquatic comparisons. Evident in two panels, blue-green, wavy, 1987-88 offering the near-identical redoubling propped side-by-side against the wall. Presenting a down-to-earth (literally) beckoning confrontational encounter. The woozy fuzzy composition produces the sensation of being under water or, conversely, a view through glass panels awash with beautiful smearing.   
 

Moira Dryer, “The Rumor”, 1988, casein on wood, 48 x 63 x 3 inches

The Rumor, 1988 with it’s roped-in sustained ebbing shrouded by a nuanced cadmium red border, nuanced with dark highlights that brings just the right timber of drama; yet another harking back to those days in service to the theater trade. While Untitled, 1990 takes the theme to a different frontier, flipping the horizontal repetition to a vertical orientation, in which the wavering shimmering vapor lines are surrounded by opaque stark black humps establishing a border.
 

Moira Dryer, Untitled, 1992, acrylic on board, 60 x 84 inches

Another work bereft of title, Untitled, 1992, brings a solid structure with the weight of an inarguable statement. The haunting use of black grommets contributes to the essence of holding. This time the stripes are straightforward and orderly. Notably, Ross Bleckner was making and showing his rigid stripe paintings, that leaned into Op, around the same time that this work was executed, leading one to posit the possibilities of cross-pollination, especially in light of the fact that the two painters were close friends. Similarities aside the lopsided amble of the paths laid down by Dryer’s lopsided brushwork are somehow more organic, like furrows strategically, but never fussily, aligned.  Plus, this is the sole work that abandons the standard casein for acrylic allowing dichotomy of natural versus artificial (man-made).
 

Moira Dryer, Untitled, 1986-88, watercolor on paper, 6 x 9 inches

The exhibition includes a half dozen rarely seen diminutive works on paper that bolster the concerns found in the paintings as well as point to wider experimental considerations.

The accumulation of factors I’ve acknowledged–as well as an early tragically romantic death–have conspired to consent something like mythic truth upon Dryer’s output. One can only imagine what she might have gone on to do had she survived. With her fate, and legacy, been sealed, a destiny fulfilled is something quite rare and unique in itself.
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A source that I didn’t so much rely on, but offered confirmation, through an informed dialogue and recountings of first-hand encounters, is; “Barry Schwabsky on Moira Dryer”, James Barron Art, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apqvVURnoDw For those wishing to gain more insight, the video on a conversation between Klaus Ottmann, Lily Siegel and Valerie Smith, produced by The Phillips Collection, in conjunction with  “Moira Dryer: Back in Business” held there in 2020, is an informative and joyously searching listen and is also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiQDSGNDi60
* Quoted from Magenta Plains Instagram page.
†  Dryer was a set designer for the legendary avant-garde theater company Mabou Mines during the 1980s.
‡ The Phillips Collection has a page on Dryer’s use of the medium on their website in relation to their 2020 exhibition of her work cited above. https://www.phillipscollection.org/blog/2020-05-27-moira-dryers-unusual-choice-casein
§ Reportedly, Dryer worked for a time as an assistant to Julian Schnabel.
¶ “Projects 42: Moira Dryer, Museum of Modern Art, NY, September 30–November 16, 1993 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/406
# “The Ghost in the Machine”, 1967, by Arthur Koestler.

Moira Dryer: Perpetual Painting
Magenta Plains
149 Canal Street, New York
March 13–April 26, 2025