BARRY RATOFF 
WHEN THE MOON HITS THE SKY ... 

MAY 8 - JUNE 15, 2025

FIERMAN at DIANA presents When the Moon Hits the Sky…, a solo exhibition by New York based artist Barry Ratoff.  It is the artist’s second show with the gallery, following an outing with photographer Charles Tracy in 2022.  The exhibition, comprised of new painting and drawing alongside a monumental grid of Polaroids from 1999, addresses the cosmos with casual elegance.  The moon and sky indeed foreground the room, both sublime and mundane. Like Dean Martin’s classic lyric misremembered, Ratoff’s work is familiar but askew. 

End of Days, a grid of 900 Captiva Polaroids of the sky Ratoff shot from his New York apartment window in 1999, anchors the space. Taken daily in the early evening, with colors ranging from midnight blue to impossible orange, the Polaroids are a document of one man’s view as the earth rotated the sun at a particular historical moment suffused with the anxieties and dreams of a new millennium. It is an ephemeral archive, a monument to feeling. Like the sky itself, Ratoff’s photographic mural contains multitudes; It is romantic, ominous, exquisite, pacific and unsettling at once. Twenty-five years later, End of Days illuminates flux; every day everywhere the sky is different and the same, at once wildly expressive and peaceably mute.  

If in End of Days Ratoff is looking up at the early evening sky, in his new works he turns his attention to the celestial world beyond the immediate horizon. Primarily abstract paintings on paper exist at the intersection of the cosmological and the emotional.  An untitled tondo, deep black with ersatz plastic jewels embedded in the surface, glowing blue from its verso, recalls the beauty and remoteness of a distant moon.  Ratoff’s work often references linguistically pop music from the 1950’s and beyond; in this exhibition a lushly feathered blue abstraction in colored pencil  bears the title Please Turn on your Magic Beam, a lyric from 1954’s “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes.  When viewed in context the works appear as sound waves hurtling across the sublime expanse of deep space, sonic missives of temporal instability endlessly seeking an unknown listener.  

Barry Ratoff (b. 1948, NY, NY) lives and works in New York.  In the past three decades he has exhibited at the Paul Morris Gallery, Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Anthony Meier Fine Art, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, Susan Inglett Gallery, and The Drawing Center, among other venues.  DIANA NEW YORK is located at 127 Henry Street / NY, NY 10002.  The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday, 12-6 PM.