Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Tracey Moffatt at 523 West 24th Street. This is the artist’s first one-person exhibition at the gallery.

Invocations is a series of 13 photo-silkscreen images shot on location in New York City. Moffatt used a stage set and actors, as she has done with earlier series, to create the new works. The settings, featuring elaborate hand-painted backdrops reminiscent of Disney animation, are not meant to depict specific, real-life locations. Instead, the artist has conjured up a world with exaggerated versions of a forest and a desert, as they might be seen from a child’s point of view. Children appear in some of the images, as do witches, wild dogs, ravens and a young man and woman. The situations can be described as dramatic, though there is no straight narrative to follow. Moffatt returns to a larger-scale format with these works, most of which measure five by four feet.

Also included in the exhibition is a new 10 minute video titled Artist. Moffatt has culled dozens of Hollywood film representations of “the artist” to create a montage that sends up popular stereotypes and clichés about this figure. From The Portrait of Dorian Gray to the recent film about Francis Bacon, Love is the Devil, Moffatt has selected examples from over sixty years of film-making.

Tracey Moffatt, who lives in Sydney, Australia and New York, has been the subject of many one-person museum exhibitions over the past two years. These include The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Kunstverein, Bregenz; Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna; Arnolfini, Bristol; Ulmer Museum, Ulm; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston; Fundacion “la Caixa,” Barcelona and, most recently, Centre National de la Photographie, Paris. In 1997 her first museum exhibition in the United States was presented at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York.

Tracey Moffatt: Invocations will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) through April 8, 2000. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

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