Melissa Meyer. Recent Work

Melissa Meyer recounted recently that during an event at Christies auction house she happened upon a display of the famous Bob Dylan electric guitar accompanied by several sheets of hand-written lyrics that had been found in the guitar case. She described that she found herself keenly interested in his handwriting and how it expressed a sense of temperament. Generally legible, his handwriting has a kind of urgency and tension. About one of the sheets, a handwriting analyst wrote that it appears Dylan “prefers directness, accuracy, exactness and simplicity.”

One senses that Meyer favors those qualities as well. Her paintings are accumulations of very sure-handed calligraphic marks that intertwine, overlap or abut each other, on top of pale colors laid down to establish the tone of each work. The gestures are often spiky and angular with a quality of tensile strength, and sometimes feature suave curves and a more relaxed tempo.

Tempo is something also very much on Meyer’s mind. Several of the paintings – Box Step, Do-Si-Do, and Shuffle – are named for dance steps. Di gala is a musical term meaning “gaily, merrily” and Desto means “sprightly, briskly.” ” The liveliness of the high-keyed colors of these paintings is in keeping with their affinity for music and dance. The largest and most recent painting in the exhibition, Devlin, is a riot of saturated colors with an overlay of darker hues. It is that aspect the dark gestures holding the surface, which connects the work to the other large-scale paintings in the exhibition.

Meyer is well known for brilliantly hued watercolors like the 2012 MacDowell Series, but around the same time she also embarked on a striking series of watercolors executed only in black on small sheets of a certain kind of hot pressed paper that she likes. Black watercolors have an open, airy tonality that suits the twisty hieroglyphs of these drawings. As Meyer told Stephanie Buhmann in a recent interview, “After I work in color, I do what I consider a black and white painting. However I mix up warm and cool blacks and in different values.” Smokey and Inky, two such paintings, are commandingly large, strong presences in a body of work that displays a considerable range of scale, structure and temperament.

This is the third solo exhibition of Melissa Meyer at Lennon, Weinberg. She was born in New York in 1946 and received both undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University. Her lengthy exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York and Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland.

Meyer’s development has been surveyed in two traveling exhibitions—one originated at the New York Studio School and the second at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her works have been included recently in group exhibitions at The Jewish Museum, New York; Texas Gallery, Houston; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York and the National Academy of Design in New York, an organization of which she is a member.

She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo and Shanghai. Her 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 and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. She is a frequent artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and worked at the MacDowell Colony for the first time in 2012.

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