Katy Moran: Andrea Rosen

Art in America, Nov, 2008 by David Coggins

The excellent young British painter Katy Moran made her solo American debut with a series of small, discreet, tasteful paintings. Rather than shout for attention with novelty, they seem meant to look--with their accomplished brushwork and refined palette--like they've existed for a long time.

Installed in the largest gallery with big empty spaces between them, the acrylic-on-canvas paintings, each just 15 by 18 inches, draw you in with their intimacy. Shyca (2008), like many of these works, confines most of the action to the center of the canvas. Amid appealing patches of pastel yellow and green are more incisive dark marks that recall the seductions of Cy Twombly's work. Moran, however, draws a little more heavily on the natural world. Among the loose nests of circular brushstrokes you begin to detect hidden forms of a reclining figure on a couch, but the imagery is very inconclusive. The perspective in Smoker's Junction (2007) makes more sense--but only barely--than that in Shyca. Vertically oriented, Smoker's Junction has an ocher-brown background and two parallel dark marks that could be a doorway or the contours of a wall. But trying to decipher what's what seems antithetical to the spirit of the work, which celebrates the joys of painting.

Press materials say Moran uses images from the Internet, magazines and her own photographs as sources for her work. In Meeting in Love (2007), bright white strokes emerge from a deep blue background with the active tension of Turner's maritime paintings. Another highlight, Wasabi Without Tears (2007), has the warm yellows and heavy rust tones of Rembrandt. Volestere (2007) contains a sweeping circle of paint that evokes a rising dust storm. There's a strong sense of movement in the swirl of strokes--we could be looking at the abstracted action from a bullfight. But as in the other paintings shown, Volestere succeeds because of the evident pleasure Moran takes in mark-making.