MELISSA MEYER

THROUGHLINES

May 18 - June 29, 2024

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 18, 6-8PM

Olympia is thrilled to announce Throughlines, a solo exhibition by Melissa Meyer. Included are ten paintings and one artist’s book, tracing the last two decades of Meyer’s painting practice. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

The exhibition’s starting point is She Belongs To Me (2003) made from the period Meyer first seriously began exploring watercolor in her studio practice. During this revelatory time, Meyer refined her approach to oil paint - thinning it to the consistency of watercolor and ink. The medium’s abiding influence on Meyer’s oil paintings is seen up to her most recent work, Springtime Trio (2024). 

Meyer infuses her paintings with palpable urban vitality. Glyphs glide across her canvases, evoking the raw energy of graffiti while retaining her distinct aesthetic identity. Meyer belongs to a generation of abstract gestural painters born in the mid-1940s. Drawing inspirational cues from artists like Arshile Gorky, Joan Mitchell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Helen Frankenthaler, Meyer challenges conventional assumptions of technique and process. Despite emerging at a time when painting was deemed passé (in the midst of Pop Art and Minimalism), Meyer's commitment to abstraction has defined her life through the subsequent years. 

Throughlines also includes Meyer’s concurrent practice of painting in books; displaying a wide-format sketchbook from her 2018 residency at Macdowell, that, by its nature, mirrors the diptych form of many of her paintings on canvas. As Meyer explains, working in a book allows her to “play in a different way” and to experiment with the collaged space (and in the case of the books, the collaged space is sometimes literal). 

Meyer has dedicated the last two decades to reinventing the abstract canon all the while steadily pushing and invigorating her script-like marks and sumptuous washes of color. At the heart of her practice lies a deep reverence for the human experience, where chance encounters and intuitive leaps intersect with precision. As the artist herself said from a recent studio visit, “Accidents favor the prepared mind” (a favorite line and quoted with uncommon delight from the French 19th-century chemist Louis Pasteur). Increasingly, Meyer’s paintings embrace ambiguity and fluidity, eschewing concrete lines in favor of gestural spontaneity, freedom, air, and speed.

Melissa Meyer received both a BS and MA from New York University. Her lengthy exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at: Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art (New York, NY); Contemporary Art Matters (Columbus, OH); 39 Great Jones (New York, NY); Lennon Weinberg Inc. (New York, NY); Elizabeth Harris Gallery (New York, NY); Rebecca Ibel Gallery (Columbus, OH); Holly Solomon Gallery (New York, NY); and Galerie Renee Ziegler (Zurich, Switzerland). Meyer's development has been surveyed in two traveling exhibitions - one originated at the New York Studio School (New York, NY) and the second at Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA). 

Her works have been included recently in group exhibitions at: The Jewish Museum (New York, NY); Texas Gallery (Houston, TX); Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, NJ); The Hyde Collection (Glens Falls, NY); and the National Academy of Design (New York, NY), an organization of which she is a member. She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Bishkek US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan.

Meyer’s work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum, and many other public and private collections across the United States. Meyer was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation. She is a frequent artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York as well as at the Vermont Studio Center.