Exhibition

Melissa Meyer. Throughlines

18 May 2024 – 29 Jun 2024

Regular hours

Saturday
11:00 – 18:00
Tuesday
11:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 18:00
Thursday
11:00 – 18:00
Friday
11:00 – 18:00

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OLYMPIA

New York
New York, United States

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About

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.

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Melissa Meyer

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