Merrill Wagner: Nature

Working in both abstract and figurative registers, the artist moves seamlessly between these different modes of expression that for her are linked in both form and content to the natural world, each in turn informing the other. Among the earliest works in the exhibition, a monochromatic hard-edge painting from 1966 features a large circle delineated with a thin, curving line set against a uniform ground. This composition can be read simultaneously as a study in color and form and also a waning moon, introducing from the outset the coexisting dualities that would come to characterize Wagner’s oeuvre. A few years later, in the mid-1970s, the artist began to look to other materials such as tape, which she had previously employed in some works, to guide her compositions. Rendered on plexiglass or paper, and enhanced with pencil, oil paint, or pastel that lends her compositions an atmospheric feel, the tape works on view retain Wagner’s earlier emphasis on form but represent an important evolution in her practice wherein process and form become intrinsically linked and the transient nature of her material is revealed. In works such as Untitled (1979), the tape is complemented by an abstract field of lightly applied oil paint that conjures Turner-esque atmospheric conditions.

The exhibition will also explore Wagner’s investigation into the creative possibilities of using found and nontraditional materials—a practice that was further spurred when she received a large quantity of slate chalkboards and fragments that had been removed during the renovation of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. While the artist had previously used slate as a support for her paintings, with this donation it became Wagner’s primary focus during this period. In Steilacoom (1979), an abstract composition of lightly applied strokes of oil, pastel, and crayon alludes to the shores of the Puget Sound in the Washington town for which the work is named.

Wagner’s works in slate find their apotheosis in works such as Outerbridge Crossing (1986), which underscores the artist’s simultaneous embrace of both the formal and material qualities of these surfaces. Composed of rectangular planks of varying size as well as a small curved fragment, the geometry of the composition is further accentuated by vertical bands of blue paint. The undulating form, which takes its name from the bridge that spans between New York’s Staten Island and New Jersey, is ultimately reminiscent of both the structure itself and the body of water across which it stretches.