Melissa Meyer: Works on Paper

Since the 1980s, when she began to exhibit regularly, Melissa Meyer's work has been distinguished by sumptuous color, fluid drawing, and generous scale. She weaves rich tapestries out of clusters of tangled, subtly inflected lines, now floating across the surface, now intertwined in layers. While her work is uncompromisingly abstract, the flickering light and shifting color of Meyer's calligraphic, knotted fabrics trigger associations with the natural world, reminding us of our experience of different times of day, of changing seasons and weather, of the instability of foliage moved by the wind, even of growth itself. Yet Meyer's work also makes us think about the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Her loose-jointed spreads of twisting colored lines can be seen as translating the implications of Jackson Pollock's all-over skeins and pours of paint into a contemporary language of transparency and luminous hues.

Meyer has often made large paintings, even mural-size works—including a recent commission for the United States Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, translated into ceramic tile—but she has always been engaged at the same time by more intimate works on paper, filling notebooks with improvisations and producing series of ravishing watercolors and ink drawings, especially during her wide-ranging sojourns in Italy, France, and various places across the United States. She is also an accomplished and experimental printmaker who has worked with an impressive roster of master printers, exploring the unpredictable possibilities of monotypes and even solar prints. But whatever their medium, her small-scale works on paper are never preparations for her canvases. The essential language of her imagery is similar, at any given time, whatever size or whatever material she employs, but watercolor and ink on paper elicit different kinds of gestures than her large canvases do. In Meyer's works on paper and monotypes, we are aware of the action of the artist's hand and supple wrist. We mentally recapitulate her complex, varied gestures as she filled the page, in contrast to our awareness of the full arm, over-scaled motions that generated her large paintings. We start thinking, too, about the long tradition of manuscript illumination, especially of the complicated, obsessive interlaces of such celebrated medieval Irish manuscripts as the Book of Kells. And then we return to the present and savor Meyer's airy, windblown swirls and glyphs for their own sake, losing ourselves in the pulsing space and light suggested by the richly hued, layered expanses her fluent hand has constructed.

Melissa Meyer lives and works in New York. She is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Jewish Museum, NY; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, among many other institutions, as well as numerous private collections.