Sam Moyer

at Sean Kelly TEFAF New York 2026, Stand 330

Halperin, Julia. "For the Artist Sam Moyer, Inspiration Was Set in Stone." The New York Times, June 3, 2025.

Known for her signature technique of inlaying found stone into canvas, Sam Moyer has long blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture. In her new works, she deepens that inquiry by introducing a dual compositional approach that juxtaposes structural clarity with expressive mark-making.

Moyer’s clippings series offers a fluid and gestural language. Here, Moyer uses stone not as a structural framework, but as a graphic tool. The compositions embrace the traditions of drawing and painting, where lines mimic the delicate arcs of ferns, and negative space becomes as active as the material itself. The stones suggest organic movement, tracing the contours of a natural world rendered in abstraction. This shift reveals Moyer’s capacity to draw from the expressive potential of her materials, using stone as both a mark and a memory.

Inspired by Claude Monet’s late works, Moyer's new works employ a palette of soft, luminous hues that reflect Monet’s preoccupation with light and perception. Like Monet, whose diminishing eyesight led to increasingly abstract, light-suffused canvases, Moyer distills her visual language to its essential elements—stone, color, surface, and gesture—inviting viewers into a space of contemplation and duality. These works meditate on time, transformation, and the emotional resonance of material, offering a poignant reflection on decomposition and regeneration, presence and impermanence.

Photo: Jason Schmidt

Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago) received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C., and her MFA from Yale University, New Haven.

Inspired equally by nature and architecture, cinema and literature, Moyer has over the course of a fifteen-year career, produced a highly evocative body of work across a broad range of natural and industrial media, ranging from stone to canvas, metal, and glass. Acutely attuned to subtle nuances of color, tone, and light, and the dynamics of space that her works occupy, Moyer’s interest in materiality and the relationship between organic and constructed form drives a practice unrestricted by traditional notions of beauty, or distinctions between painting and sculpture. She produces work on both a monumental and intimate scale, embracing absence and presence, and balance and chance, to create powerfully expressive forms.

Moyer’s first major public art installation, Doors for Doris, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, was on view at the entrance to New York’s Central Park at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in 2020–2021. The work has since been acquired by the Buffalo AKG for permanent installation in its sculpture garden. Most recently, Moyer was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York and the Hill Art Foundation, New York.

Her work has been included in important solo and group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND); University Art Museum, University of Albany; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; The Jule Collins Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University; and MoMA PS1, Queens, New York. In 2018, Moyer was the subject of a solo presentation at Art Basel Unlimited. Her work is included in prominent public collections including the Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus Museum of Art; The UBS Collection, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, amongst others. Moyer lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.