Jill Moser’s recent work originates in the gestural line that has been her hallmark for thirty years. Gestures that capture the feeling of being caught in the act, caught as they are made, held in suspended animation. Moser has conceived a language of drawing, painting, and printmaking that resists figuration to celebrate visual narratives. While extending the legacy of gestural abstraction set out by women artists such as Joan Mitchell and Lynda Benglis, Moser’s body of work is also indebted to 70s avant-garde filmmakers and choreographers. She’s after intimate corporeal encounters that entice viewers to become active participants. By the late 2010s, Moser began her in-depth study of color, investigating the eroticism of vividly chromatic forms. With color as protagonist, a rhythmic string of metonymic relationships takes shape within more expansive spaces. This broader repertoire of gestural marks focuses on the haptics of surface and the emotional dynamics of color as it resonates with the interplay of line and form. Expanding ideas central to her practice, Moser engages in numerous collaborations with writers, master printers, and other artists that inspire correspondences with new ideas and materials. By 2020, extreme political and cultural shifts led Moser to create a new atlas of images. Continued collaborations pull her work in new directions, generating work that features layered materials, where meaning follows the saturated color relationships between dialogic shapes and episodic acts of gesture.
