NEW YORK, NY.- The drawings in this exhibition, seen now nearly twenty-five years since they were made, capture Jill Moser in the act of gradually, stubbornly, and in a most unpredictable fashion, defining the parameters that have guided her development ever since. We see in them the emerging track of her distinctive touch and the beginning of a dialogue not just between figure and ground, but one in which the ground has a dimensional space that rivals that of the overlaid graphic figure.

We see the nascent emergence of the psychology of her expressive line and the way it melded abstraction and reference, figurative to some extent but also embodying an ancestry of artists and deeply absorbed influences. Moser cites those as including, at this time, Judith Bernstein, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, and Lynda Benglis, but Brice Marden is here too, as are Picasso and Gorky and a whole host of sources that nourish all artists who devote themselves to deeply and continually looking at art, and who seek more broadly to incorporate lived experience into their work.

There is a searching quality to these drawings that suggest that uncertainty can be fruitful in ways that decisiveness closes off, and this has been characteristic of Moser’s pursuits that have propelled her forward. Drawing may have been her primary medium at this stage of her development, but she has since mastered a range of formats and mediums in ways that collapse boundaries between ends and means. She is an adventuresome printmaker and has continually tested the capacity of her paintings to delve into issues of scale, color, touch, technique and a core interest in the identity of the performative mark as a record of its own making.

The series culminated in a well-known body of her work, titled North Fork Drawings, a few of which are included in the current show. The series was the subject of an exhibition in the gallery space of renowned drawings collection Wynn Kramarsky in Soho in 1996, accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Michael Brenson.

The three dozen drawings in this exhibition were chosen from more than a hundred, the majority of which have never been shown although works from this period are included in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Fogg Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Arkansas Art Center and the Achenbach Foundation.