Hirschl & Adler Modern is pleased to present 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.
