Sam Moyer: Woman with Holes

The Hill Art Foundation is pleased to announce Woman with Holes, opening May 1, 2025. Curated by Sam Moyer, the exhibition presents work by Moyer alongside selections from the Hill Collection. The presentation will be accompanied by a publication featuring an essay by Scout Hutchinson. 

The full range of Moyer’s work is on view, from early dyed canvas paintings to her signature stone paintings—works comprised of reclaimed marble set into painted plaster—to recent handmade paper works fabricated at Dieu Donné, a non-profit cultural institution dedicated to the creation of contemporary art using the process of hand papermaking. 

The exhibition is a survey of Moyer’s engagement with abstraction as a kind of dream logic—snippets from life only partially resurfacing, familiar forms encountered in a strange context. This incongruity defines Moyer’s approach to material and composition: in her work, stone becomes weightless, windows function more like walls, and canvas parades as marble slabs. The exhibition presents Moyer’s work in the company of objects from the Hill Collection that similarly exist on the outer edges of functionality and reason, with pieces by artists including Robert Gober, Liz Glynn, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Isamu Noguchi.

Woman with Holes takes its title from a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, the first work by the sculptor to be shown at the Hill Art Foundation. Noguchi’s Woman With Holes II (1969) is emblematic of his engagement with abstraction, organic forms, and the embodied materiality of stone. The work, which has not been exhibited since its inclusion in the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibition of contemporary sculpture in 1970, connects to larger themes of naturalism and personification that anchor the exhibition.

Each gallery in the exhibition functions as a distinct vignette, revealing an unfolding series of tableaus with dramatic scale shifts and unexpected pairings. Throughout, Moyer encourages viewers to linger in the space between recognition and ambiguity—a reminder that perception is always shifting and meaning is never fixed. The artist seeks to bring her work into conversation with key selections from the Hill Collection via an interplay of light and shadow, whether filling a gallery with patterned reflections or colored light. 

Furthering her explorations of architecture and domestic space, she directs special focus towards the Foundation’s windows. Screen for Mure-cho (2025) encases a window in a paper lattice, creating a powerful dialogue between form and material that produces a complex shadow pattern. 

Brick Window (2017), on view for the first time since debuting at 56 Henry in 2017, playfully inverts expectations with an unexpected marriage between stained glass and brick. Like much of Moyer’s practice, the work explores the contradictions between fragility and strength, light and dark, and openings and obstacles. Many of the other artists included in the exhibition, from Robert Gober to Brice Marden, further consider windows, portals, and illumination in their work. Moyer’s monumental stone painting Fern Friend Grief Growth (2024), created for her 2024 solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, is a physical and thematic anchor for the exhibition. The cyclical nature of both material and subject—reclaimed marble, ferns unfurling from the undergrowth—gestures towards a time scale beyond comprehension. Moyer has paired the work with Liz Glynn’s delicate Untitled (Tumbleweed XIII) (2017), a playful inversion of scale but a sculpture with similar concerns: Glynn has rendered her titular weed in stainless steel. This coupling embodies the dream logic that animates the exhibition, where works invite us to embrace the tension between the familiar and the uncanny, and recognition and mystery coexist, reshaping the way we see and experience the world around us.

An exhibition of new work by Moyer will be on view concurrently at Sean Kelly New York, from May 2 through June 14.