Overview
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Always Venus, Never Mars, the first UK solo exhibition of American artist Carrie Moyer, featuring new abstract paintings and works on paper.
In this exhibition, Moyer continues to embed her queer feminist politics within an expansive and distinctly elastic legacy of 20th-century American abstraction. Born in an era shaped by the civil rights movement, Marcel Duchamp’s revival and Helen Frankenthaler’s triumph, Always Venus, Never Mars sees Moyer pushing deeper into the 21st-century, steering away from apocalyptic thinking and toward imaginative possibility.
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Always Venus, Never Mars, the first UK solo exhibition of American artist Carrie Moyer, featuring new abstract paintings and works on paper.
In this exhibition, Moyer continues to embed her queer feminist politics within an expansive and distinctly elastic legacy of 20th-century American abstraction. Born in an era shaped by the civil rights movement, Marcel Duchamp’s revival and Helen Frankenthaler’s triumph, Always Venus, Never Mars sees Moyer pushing deeper into the 21st-century, steering away from apocalyptic thinking and toward imaginative possibility.
The works in the exhibition are crafted, as is typical across Moyer’s practice, from acrylic paint and a range of material inclusions, conveying her vibrant belief in a human-made future. She has described her commitment to acrylic as “a way to thumb my nose at the hierarchy of materials—noble and eternal oil on top; commercial, synthetic, disposable acrylic down below.” Plastic, she notes, though often dismissed as cheap, toxic, culturally inferior and ecologically destructive, “was and remains the invisible architecture of contemporary life.”
Moyer's ongoing experimentations with paint, texture, technique and reference continue across this new body of work. She incorporates glitter, pumice, mica, micaceous iron oxide and new to this exhibition, ground glass, along with minerals, dustings and particles caught in the air or captured in a pour of paint. Suspended within the acrylic, these materials catch the light in ways the paint itself cannot, creating a telescoping effect where new elements come into focus as the viewer moves around the canvas.
Moyer’s distinctive visual vocabulary—cosmic spills and biomorphic forms set in imagined spaces that telescope between the macro and micro—appears throughout. In these new works, however, spatial perception is deliberately destabilised. At one moment the viewer may register a flat, graphic surface; at another, a sense of looking into a recess or even the back of the painting becomes palpable. Each work employs a distinct compositional strategy drawn from across Moyer’s practice, ranging from freeform gesture to more structured arrangements, resulting in paintings that continually shift between depth and flatness, solidity and dissolution.
Finger-painted contrails and ground-glass eruptions celebrate the enormity of space and time, right-sizing our era of political myopia. Moyer’s vision remains rooted in this world, yet she suspends gravity and normalcy through her imaginative use of colour. Through these channels, the paintings generate multiple simultaneous eventualities where perceptual and conceptual plasticity resides. If there is narrative, no single story rules. If edges appear crisp and bodies firm, wait—they will slide and dissolve again.
