For her third solo exhibition at Deweer Gallery, 'SHITS AND GIGGLES', American and British artist Melissa Gordon (b. 1981, Cambridge, USA) has made an environment of larger than human scale paintings with a special focus on body, consumption, gender, feminism and the act of painting. The works bear an assembly of Gordon’s characteristic 'gestures' - varying from hanging ready-mades, photos and expressive traces of thick paint, to silkscreen prints of garments, words or digital drawings. All gestures are applied on a grid, an imaginary space referring to the abstraction of scale (and the possibility of being ‘hung on’). With a playful and critical touch, the artist questions the value of gestures in all its liquidity and multitude of layers - oscillating between figuration and abstraction, surface and depth, the visible and the hidden, the réal reality and the pictorial world, presentation and representation.

Melissa Gordon is currently writing a doctorate in the arts on Gesture and Liquidity with Kingston University, UK. She graduated from the BFA program in Painting/Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA and attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. She has attended several residencies, including: Cove Park, International Artist In Residence, Cove, Scotland (2013), Spike Print and Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2013), University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA (2010); WIELS in Brussels, BE (2008) and De Ateliers in Amsterdam, NL (2003).

Gordon has had numberous solo exhibitions across Europe and America. We list the most recent and important ones: ‘Collision’, Swiss Church in London, UK (2018); ‘Routine Pleasures’, The Vleeshal in Middelburg, NL (2016); ‘Derivative Value’, Overbeck-Gesellschaft in Lübeck, Germany (2016) and The Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK (2016). Recent group shows include: ‘The Mechanics of fluids’ (curated by Melissa Gordon), Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, USA (2018); ‘This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things’, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, ‘The Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art’, Kunsthal Oslo, Norway (2017); ‘Something Stronger Than Me*’, WIELS in Brussels, BE (2017) and ‘Salon Hang’, Kunstverein Amsterdam, NL (2017).

Melissa Gordon was a Nominee for the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2010) and was awarded, amongst others, the ABN AMRO Art Prize, Amsterdam, NL (2007).