Saugerties gallery showcase Melissa Meyer’s work
The exhibition “Melissa Meyer: On Paper” continues at Cross Contemporary Art, 99 Partition St., Saugerties.
Meyer has created a diverse body of work that includes oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints and large-scale public commissions. Her art has been shown widely in the United States and abroad. She has been the recipient of many grants and residencies, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation. Her work has been featured in over 40 solo and group exhibitions, and is included in many important private and public collections, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Jewish Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art.
Meyer is inspired by dance, structures, architecture, writing, handwriting and everything that is beautiful. She has stated that she works “intuitively, thinking about brushwork as a kind of choreography, a dance that happens in the wrists and the arms, as well as in the whole body,” according to a release.
The art critic David Cohen has likened her works to quilts “in the way they patch together discrete areas, often forming a loose grid of irregular rectangles of color and calligraphy.” Her works have the character of abstract musical scores — a lively and shifting expanse of lyrical, rhythmic, visceral responses to her ideas. In fact, Meyer’s works have often been inspired by a favorite song (such as the Beatles “Love Me Do” or Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me”).
Meyer thins her oil paints to a liquid consistency close to that of watercolor and seeks to achieve similar visual effects. In her oil painting “She Belongs to Me,” she employed the wet-over-dry and wetinto-wet technique natural to watercolor, which first garnered her serious interest in the early 1990s during a residency in Switzerland. She desires to translate the medium’s effects into something “major, assertive, flamboyant,” and to create images that are “as volatile, but also as delicate, as water itself.”
Meyer’s works are often inspired by her immediate surroundings and the circumstances under which she is creating. The Cassis Garden series was created during a residency in August 2016 at the Bau In-
stitute in the town of Cassis in Provence in southern France, where the institute put her up in a space overlooking a beautiful view of gardens and the Mediterranean Sea. The watercolor series is an abstract visual response to the gardens, views and general surroundings that she experienced that month — the light, the air and the colors all fed her visual responses.
The exhibition runs through Sunday, July 1. The gallery’s summer hours are Thursdays through Mondays from noon to 5 p.m. or by appointment.
Call (845) 247-3122 or visit crosscontemporaryart.com for more information.