“My work seeks to find throughlines from the ancient past to present to future. I want to know how things change through time and how they stay the same.”

- Morgan Hobbs

Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Chronolith, Morgan Hobbs’ first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and with the gallery.      

Guest writer Lauren Whearty says: “Hobbs’ body of work focuses on the slow and methodical process of building a language - a new form of communication through paint, papier-mâché, and image. Each symbolic form is a building block for a wide array of possibilities with the potential to make new meaning through different combinations, or to break down the strength of an individual symbol into a more democratic piece of a larger whole.

While I recognized many of the symbols from her previous bodies of work, like the interiors in her Bell the Cat series, the forms now exist on their own free to roam the studio and assert themselves as sculptures and whole compositions in dimensional paintings. The forms are still understood as ornamental symbols, however, the mass of the sculptures and the dimensional qualities in the paintings give a more architectural feeling and weight to each glyph. The duality of the actual weight vs the perceptual weight is just one of the many elements of tension presented in this work. The works also perform a balancing act between painting and sculpture, and between the single vs the many.

“The shadows are everything, imbuing unexpected meaning. They are unplanned, undefined, but dependent upon the viewer emotionally or psychologically. Shadows hide and reveal, form emerges and disappears.”

-Eileen Goodman

In her latest solo exhibition, Into Light, Eileen Goodman’s watercolor facility is on bold display. Since her transition away from oil paint in the late ’80s, Goodman has skillfully tamed this temperamental, aqueous media for use in her abundant, large-scale still life paintings. When creating work, she is focused on the basic components of observation, color, light, and shadow. It is only upon reflection, after deep shadows have defined their purpose, that possible interpretations come to light.

“I have a longing for a certain beauty that’s hard to describe, but it’s usually associated with summer colors. My desire for this summertime feeling seems inexhaustible, and though I’ve been trying for many years, I don’t feel like I am ever really satisfied.”

- Kurt Moyer

For over a decade, Kurt Moyer’s work has combined his love of nature with his reverence for art history. Born in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Moyer spent much of his youth exploring the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. Moyer now resides in rural New York near Rochester where he spends his time plein air painting from the beginning of spring until late fall. These passions converge in Moyer’s new abstract paintings on view at Gross McCleaf...