Alexander Gray Associates returns to Frieze
Carrie Moyer So Many Moons Ago, 2025 Signed, titled, and dated on verso Acrylic, fiber paste, coarse black mag num, and glitter on canvas 66 x 78 in (167.6 x 198.1 cm)
Alexander Gray Associates presents works by Kamrooz Aram, Ricardo Brey, Bethany Collins, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Kang Seung Lee, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer, Betty Parsons, Joan Semmel, and Ruby Sky Stiler. Across painting, sculpture, and works on paper, these artists examine how images and materials shape experience, memory, and belief. Moving between figuration and abstraction, they consider how meaning is inherited, disrupted, and remade.
Joan Semmel's paintings treat the body as lived experience rather than objectified image, collapsing the distance between subject, painter, and viewer. For more than five decades, her work has asserted self-representation as both feminist proposition and painterly method. Ruby Sky Stiler's composite figures in Cropped Bather with Seated Artist (2025) similarly reclaim the authority of the female body, repositioning women from passive subjects to empowered makers.
Melvin Edwards Inside and Out, 1963-64 Welded steel1 2 x 8 x 5in (30.5x20.3x12.7cm)
Kamrooz Aram San Cosimato, 2025 Signed and dated on verso Oil, oil pastel , and pencil on linen 84x60 in (213.3x152.4cm)
If the body becomes a site where meaning is constructed and contested, material itself operates as a parallel register of force and memory. Melvin Edwards's welded steel sculptures and works on paper distill compression, tension, and release into physical form. This presentation marks the debut of rare 1960s works, including Inside and Out (1963–64), a Lynch Fragment created in Los Angeles more than sixty years ago. Donald Moffett's hybrid objects extend Edwards’s material inquiry. Works like Lot 040225 (nature cult, mutation) (2025) treat engineered surfaces as sites of psychological and political charge, where the industrial meets the organic.
These investigations into what materials hold—physically, historically, emotionally—trace back to Betty Parsons's mid-century abstractions, including Looking Back (1957), which recall a foundational moment when risk and improvisation opened new possibilities for American painting. Carrie Moyer extends this legacy, reclaiming ornament, sensuality, and excess as critical strategies. Where Parsons worked within the constraints of her era, Moyer expands abstraction into contemporary feminist vocabularies. Her painting So Many Moons Ago (2025) generates new experiential modes through innovative approaches to color, texture, and surface.
If Moyer reclaims ornament within contemporary practice, Kamrooz Aram’s San Cosimato (2025) reveals it as foundational to abstraction itself, demonstrating how ornamental traditions share the same conceptual rigor as modernist painting. Jennie C. Jones locates another form of cultural knowledge within abstraction. Deep Red Tone with Flourish (2026) uses architectural felt and acrylic to translate musical architecture into visual form. Across these practices, abstraction becomes a carrier of cultural memory and historical specificity, rather than merely a form of formal experimentation.
Bethany Collins Moby Dick (Epilogue),2025 Signed, titled, and dated on verso Graphite on Somerset paper 443/8x301/8in(112.7x76.5cm) 467/8x325/8x13/4in framed (119.1 x 82.9 x 4.4 cm framed)
Bethany Collins forwards how that memory might be recovered and contested. Through works like Moby Dick (Epilogue) (2025), she enacts erasure and reconstruction as methods for examining what societies remember and what they seek to obscure. Kang Seung Lee's Untitled (Untitled, Joe Brainard, 1971) (2025) operates in the same territory, where preservation becomes an act of intimacy and care. In both practices, memory emerges as a living, unsettled structure, always subject to revision and retrieval.
Across generations and methods, these artists demonstrate that images don't merely reflect meaning, but actively shape it. From Semmel's reconfigured body to Collins's evocative surfaces, gesture and material become sites where history lives, contested, reimagined, and remade.
For more information about this fair and future exhibitions at Alexander Gray Associates, please visit their website here. They also can be found on Instagram here. To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze, sign up to the newsletter here and follow on Instagram, X and Frieze Official are on Facebook. Tickets to the fair are available can be found here, along with more information about the fair.
