David Zwirner New York is showcasing a solo exhibition of work by acclaimed American artist, Frank Moore.
Housed at the gallery’s 69th Street location, the eponymously titled Frank Moore: Five Paintings explores many pertinent themes that continue to resonate today. In Wizard (1994), a painting made at the height of the AIDS crisis, Moore envisioned an apocalyptic composition filled with bodies, severed hands, fire and floating eyeballs. In the foreground, the artist included French virologist Jean-Claude Chermann, who treated Moore and under the administrative supervision of Luc Montagnier, gathered research that led to the discovery of AIDS and HIV.
“Wizard can be read like a Boschian treatise of the AIDS crisis at that moment in time…,” said David Leiber in a past lecture at Cornell University in 2012. “The Plague is presented like a fable, almost a Wizard of Oz landscape littered with the accouterments of the health-care industry…. This painting, one of the artist’s finest, became a cult picture of the 1990s.”
Moore, who died due of AIDS-related complications in 2002, used the painting to comment on the collective tragedy of the epidemic, along with his belief of the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly on administering care.
“Frank’s work was not political in the sense of trying to accomplish specific ideological objectives,” said Loring McAlpin, founding member of the AIDS activist art collective, Gran Fury. “But in examining connected ecosystems—the global effects of genetic engineering, the love affair between oil interests and agriculture, or multiple impacts of a virus, bodily and cultural—his paintings often led to political insights,” she added.
Frank Moore: Five Paintings will be on view at David Zwirner New York until December 10.
In case you missed it, Christie’s is auctioning furniture once owned by Marie Antoinette.
David Zwirner
34 East 69th Street
New York 10021 New York
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wazup.