ADAA Fair: Booth D4

ADAA Fair 2026 | Booth D4
Preview Gala: November 12, 2026
Public Days: November 13 – 16, 2026
Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, NY 10065

Alexander Gray Associates presents paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Carrie Moyer and Betty Parsons. Despite coming from different generations, Moyer and Parsons are united in their use of exuberant color and organic forms to create sensuous abstractions rooted in their respective lived experiences. The ADAA Fair presentation marks a significant moment for each artist: following Parsons's major retrospective, Betty Parsons: An Expanded World, at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and coinciding with Moyer's inclusion in Gender, Genre, and Generation: Women Painting Abstraction, on view at the Sheldon Museum of Art through January 2027.

In paintings and works on paper like Red Eminence (1955) and Buddha of the Flowers (1958), Betty Parsons channeled the “sheer energy” of her surroundings into vibrant, spirited abstractions. Visible brushstrokes and seemingly quick, decisive gestures point to Parsons’s spontaneous way of working, which drew upon her training as a landscape watercolorist, and sought to translate her impressions of the world into an idiosyncratic abstract language.

Taking up the historical mantle of Parsons’s generation of Color Field painters—many of whom Parsons also championed as a gallerist—Carrie Moyer imbues her canvases and works on paper with both the graphic flatness of her 1990s agitprop posters and the lush material possibilities of acrylic paint. In paintings like Cave Dwellers Who Paint Abstraction (2025), Moyer utilizes a host of techniques familiar to painters of Parsons’s generation, such as pouring, staining, rolling, and spraying, to achieve surfaces that vacillate between abstraction and cosmic representation. At the same time, Moyer imbues her paintings and works on paper with a sensibility steeped in queer, feminist politics, which she foregrounds by introducing materials like glitter and emphasizing optical pleasure in the face of our uncertain historical moment.

Born sixty years apart, Moyer and Parsons evince discrete approaches to abstraction that nonetheless share an embrace of vivid color, material innovation, and evocative biomorphic compositions. Eschewing the modernist assumption that formalist painting is inherently pure, both Parsons and Moyer allow life beyond the canvas to enter the picture plane.