press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present The Los Angeles Drawings, an exhibition of new works on paper by Robyn O’Neil. The exhibition marks the artist’s first with the gallery, and will be on view from May 15 through June 19, 2021.

An open-source, impressionistic handling of memory as material turns Robyn O’Neil’s Los Angeles Drawings, the most recent examples in her ongoing Cloudmaker series, into declarations of being through expansive, tender, and wry reticulations of art historical flashes and personal episodes. A wispy cloud from Emil Nolde’s The Seal, 1912, and a brooding cloud from Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy hang next to one another, having been precision-plucked from different painted skies altogether; nearby is a glyphic cloud lifted from a sweatshirt worn by the Beth Howland character on Alice, the classic sitcom that ran during the artist’s youth. Sensitive compositional decisions equalize rangy sources and experiences, translating them into articulations of memory’s persistent flightiness and its location at the forefront of the human experience. 

O’Neil’s lifelong practice of meticulously archiving significant, if outwardly esoteric, impressions of artworks experienced, emotions felt, and complaints lodged, in hundreds of composition notebooks, allows her access to a timeline of primary thoughts and lived annotations. Fragments of poetry, clouds–lots of clouds–observed in skies both painted and real, studies, dreams, and clippings pack the lined pages, actualizing O’Neil’s mental marginalia. Making their way into her drawings, these hyper-specific moments trade singularity for generosity, becoming nodes of potential connection with the viewer over shared, or yet-to-be-shared, experiences. Collaged off-cuts from the studio invite the viewer further into the artist’s internal world, where even a floating scrap carries meaning. 

The spiritual foundation for the Los Angeles Drawings is O’Neil’s work Low American Grace (2018), the monumental drawing that first saw the artist’s work and process align more closely with her notebooks. Marked by associative thoughts and a turn away from the narrative figuration that defined the early part of her career, that drawing proved paradigm shifting in her practice. The Los Angeles Drawings describe a post-extinction world, where the artist’s well-known tracksuit-clad men have been wiped out, mercilessly or mercifully, with memory replacing action. Humanity has finally succumbed to the relentless calamity by which it lived; memories and experiences–large, small, imagined–replace physical bodies. Unmoored thoughts drift over naked landscapes. And yet, Kerry James Marshall remains. Monet sticks around. Memories of The Norton Simon, The Huntington, and Judy Garland’s mausoleum suggest the future vestiges of a society destroyed by an insistence upon depravity and violence. 

Still, a pervasive feeling of love–for her ethereal subjects, her lost little men, and her viewers– prevent the Los Angeles Drawings from slouching into nihilism or premature elegy. Humanity’s greatness remains bound up with its impermanence. Clouds are appealing to artists and observers for their immense temporariness. While clouds echo that loudest and most insidious fear of one’s own erasure, O’Neil’s drawings reassure with the promise of posterity. They offer a gentle eternity where history and memory become one, even if no one remains to witness it. If Vladimir Nabakov’s cradle rocks above an abyss, Robyn O’Neil’s floats on air. 

Robyn O’Neil (b. 1977) lives and works in Washington State. In late 2019, her work was the subject of a mid-career survey, WE, THE MASSES, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Des Moines Center of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, and is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

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