Alexander Gray Associates presents Donald Moffett: Snowflake, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together new extruded-oil and spray paintings, a free-to-take bumper-sticker installation, and the moving-image work Aluminum/White House Unmoored, the presentation considers how contemporary art engages public concerns—environmental stress, civic institutions, and the rhetoric of protest—without reducing itself to slogans.
The “Snowflake” paintings are engineered for optical and material ambiguity. Worked in whites, pewter tones, and pale blues, their drilled and pierced fields appear alternately to recede into or hover before the wall, producing a measured dissonance between surface and support. The series sits within Moffett’s ongoing NATURE CULT project, which addresses environmental acceleration while acknowledging a built-in contradiction: industrial paints, plywood, and specialized application techniques both visualize ecological strain and participate in the material economy that underwrites it. As the artist notes, “The surface holds—lush and fragile… The structure and substructure drift, melt, and erode,” a formulation that captures the works’ calibrated balance of seduction and collapse.
Presented in dialogue with these paintings, Aluminum/White House Unmoored depicts the executive residence in a state of dissolution. The piece treats political architecture not as a fixed icon but as an image vulnerable to erosion, placing institutional symbolism under the same pressure the paintings exert on pictorial structure. Together, the works sustain a rigorous vocabulary of drifting, melting, and unmooring—terms that are formal before they are thematic, yet legible across art and public life.
A takeaway set of bumper stickers extends Moffett’s long-standing interest in direct address. Their concise, declarative language recalls the strategies of activist graphics while their analog circulation—designed for bodies, cars, and streets rather than feeds—underscores the changing conditions of attention and persuasion in a saturated media environment. The stickers function as modest counter-devices: portable, slow, and site-specific.
Moffett’s biography amplifies this tension between immediacy and reflection. As a founding member of Gran Fury, the graphic-activist collective that emerged from ACT UP, he helped develop a language of urgency for street-level communication during the AIDS crisis. In parallel, through Bureau, the design studio he co-founded with Marlene McCarty, he adapted principles of clarity and address for nonprofit and commercial clients. His studio practice, by contrast, embeds political content within abstraction’s procedures—surface engineering, optical interference, and a sustained interest in how materials index time and pressure.
Across media, the exhibition frames dissolution—of surfaces, symbols, and communicative certainty—as both image and method. Rather than proposing resolution, it delineates where aesthetic inquiry can register structural stress while acknowledging its own limits as material culture produced within the conditions it examines. Moffett’s work has been widely exhibited and is represented in major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Blanton Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Hammer Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Menil Collection; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Venue and dates: Alexander Gray Associates, New York — September 12–October 25, 2025. Opening reception: Friday, September 12, 6:00–8:00 p.m. Work date: Aluminum/White House Unmoored (2004). Selected solo exhibitions: Alice Austen House, Staten Island (2025); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland (2024); McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2022); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011), with subsequent venues at The Andy Warhol Museum and the Tang Teaching Museum (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2002). Selected group exhibitions: MASP, São Paulo (2024); National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (2024); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2022); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019); Whitney Biennial (1993).
