The Cowgirl 1956

Zoe Mozert made this painting of a cowgirl, we don't know when, using a very playful, candy-coated palette. It’s all process: the process of making a woman into a symbol, the process of painting that symbol, the process of seeing and understanding that symbol. The paint in this piece is thin and blended, not really showing a trace of the brush, more like an illustration. But there's this incredible, almost awkward layering in the background. Look at the sky: those marks could be pastel or paint, scumbled into each other creating a sense of depth and movement, it reminds me a little bit of Arthur Dove. Ultimately, paintings like this are about an image, but also about the pleasure we take in artifice, in the push and pull between reality and representation.