Frieze New York 2025 | Booth B13
Preview (invitation-only): May 7–8, 2025
Public Days: May 9–11, 2025
The Shed, 545 West 30th Street, New York
Alexander Gray Associates presents recent paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Jennie C. Jones and Donald Moffett. Longtime friends, Frieze New York marks a significant moment for both artists: Moffett has just joined the Gallery’s program, while Jones's Roof Garden Commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened to critical acclaim. The Gallery's presentation draws parallels between Jones and Moffett's distinct practices, emphasizing how both artists embrace a rigorous, research-driven approach to abstraction grounded in formal and material experimentation.
In 2025 paintings like Met Color Angled Cadence, Jennie C. Jones continues exploring the perception of sound within the visual arts. While her earlier Acoustic Panel Paintings incorporated noise-absorbing fiberglass panels into their construction, recent works use architectural felt, an industrial material likewise valued for its sound-dampening qualities. Jones’s strategic use of felt pushes her canvases into more sculptural, relief-like domains, enabling each piece to develop its own hushed sonic environment. Her surfaces reverberate with a historical charge: she imbues seemingly simple forms with references to modernism, Minimalism, and the contributions of Black avant-garde sonic practitioners. Marking a further expansion on these references, recent works’ geometric compositions and color palettes subtly draw from her rooftop commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Similarly committed to formal innovation, Donald Moffett creates pierced and shaped monochromatic paintings like Lot 020425 (the probe, A) (2025). These works boast textured fields of white extruded oil paint, ghostly topographies that suggest flora and fauna—and their potential absence. Moffett embeds environmental urgency and sociopolitical critique in his surfaces; far from neutral, his paintings’ pristine whiteness signals ecological vulnerability and institutional complicity. These works emerge from his ongoing project NATURE CULT, which he developed in the mid-2010s in response to the escalating climate crisis. Lot 060624 (house, orange) (2024), a fantastically colored, horned birdhouse, also belongs to this body of work. This totemic sculpture serves as a signpost for the crossroads of natural and cultural systems—a melancholic tribute to the biodiversity threatened by environmental inaction.
Like Jones, Moffett transforms industrial materials into nuanced meditations on contemporary issues. While Jones's compositions create space for viewers to contemplate sound, history, and absence, Moffett's surfaces speak to ecological fragility and loss. By treating painting as a dimensional object, both artists challenge the conventional limitations of the medium, constructing works that critically examine the sites they inhabit. Together, Jones and Moffett's approaches charge the legacy of Minimalism and the monochrome with a powerful urgency that resonates deeply in our present moment.
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