I’ve been following Melissa Meyer’s profession as carefully as doable since I first wrote about her work in 2009. Admittedly, I used to be a latecomer: Meyer started exhibiting within the early Nineteen Seventies, when the artwork world was dominated by Pop Artwork, Coloration Subject portray, and Minimalism, all of which had been thought to be reactions towards Summary Expressionism, significantly its use of the hand and autobiographical gesture. Then once more, Meyer may be thought-about premature, as she by no means felt compelled to reject drawing in paint. From the mid-Nineteen Seventies till 2001, she made looping, elegant brushstrokes of evenly dispersed paint throughout giant surfaces. What I believe many critics have missed in writing about these works is the extent of management required of the artist to reach at her lush, sleek surfaces. This was not related to Summary Expressionism, whose impact the poet James Schuyler described as: “the floods of paint in whose crashing surf all of us scramble.”
Between 2001 and 2003, Meyer determined to alter her observe with out giving up her AbEx roots. She started working in watercolor, the antithesis of oil paint; this led her to skinny her oil paint, giving it a liquidity that had not been a part of her earlier work. On the similar time, as in her earlier work, the mark is paramount, quite than the drip, which has by no means been a part of her vocabulary.
Meyer additionally determined to interrupt up the sector throughout which her brushstrokes easily unfurled, and incorporate Photoshop into her compositions; these modifications had been prompted by two commissions for giant public works in Japan. Disjuncture changed lyricism. I admired her determination to step out of her consolation zone, one thing few artists do.
For many who will not be aware of Meyer’s artwork, Throughlines, her debut exhibition at Olympia gallery, which incorporates 10 work and one in all her sketchbooks, is an efficient place to begin. The present covers the previous 20 years (2003 to 2024), when she modified her observe and thus elevated her work to a spot that’s recognizably hers.
In distinction to her earlier work, with their dense brushstrokes, Meyer’s artwork of the previous 20 years consists of thinly painted summary glyphs. They’re asemic indicators, evoking each a language with no semantic that means and indecipherable city graffiti. The triptych “Springtime Trio” (2024) consists of layers of glyphs on a white floor — first yellow, then blue and pink, and at last a unique depth of pink or blue positioned over the same colour. The interrelationship between the layers — blue upon yellow and pink upon pink — doesn’t really feel programmatic.
One other change that has taken place in Meyer’s work is in her cultivation of sunshine. There’s a luminosity to the colour, a glow to the stacked asemic indicators enhanced by the patchwork yellow floor in “Lizzie Hazeldean” (2010). The portray’s title refers to a brief story by Edith Wharton, “New 12 months’s Day” (printed 1890), a couple of married girl who had a scandalous affair with a rich bachelor. Wharton was inspecting the social expectations and obstacles that prevented a girl from gaining her independence at the moment. With its completely different reds, oranges, and yellows, turquoises, darkish blues, and blacks, Meyer’s palette alludes to the fireplace that drives the occupants out of a less-than-fashionable resort, together with the illicit lovers. The work additionally factors to the query: How does a girl artist make her means in a world dominated by male codes?
This has preoccupied the artist all through her profession, and has prolonged to her consideration of different artists, together with these as completely different as Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler. Meyer’s use of thinned oil paint shares one thing with Frankenthaler’s stain work, but pushes towards them by emphasizing hand drawing and rejecting drips and any signal of accident or probability, whereas her 2023 exhibition Grace and Me at Up to date Artwork Issues responded to the work of Grace Hartigan. The work on this exhibition had been impressed by an invite to reply to two Hartigan work within the Rockefeller Assortment for the present Impressed Encounters: Girls Artists and the Legacies of Fashionable Artwork on the David Rockefeller Inventive Arts Middle (October 1, 2022–March 19, 2023). These exhibitions are vital as a result of they counsel an unsentimental historical past of affect and alter that diverges from widespread artwork historic narratives that target rupture and heroic struggles to overthrow or jettison the previous. Working with line and colour for greater than 20 years, Meyer has proven that reductive portray needn’t squeeze out improvisation. For this alone, she deserves a protracted overdue survey.
Melissa Meyer: Throughlines continues at Olympia (41 Orchard Avenue, Decrease East Aspect, Manhattan) by means of June 29. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.