Maddie Phinney reviews the exhibition Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library, New York, on view through December 8, 2012.
Phinney writes: "A skilled painter trained in abstraction, Moore turned to representation in the early 1980s for its narrative capacity… The dreamlike quality of Moore’s work from this time has its roots in surrealism, in particular the American surrealist Paul Cadmus, evidenced both by the artist’s formal use of color and the iconography in his work dealing with gender and sexuality… Dream-like as they are, there is something distinctly literary about Moore’s paintings, each a tome with layers of information to be read and discovered."