Born in Santa Monica in 1962 and based in New York, Melissa Kretschmer works at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Her practice is grounded in a sustained and rigorous investigation of materials and their inherent structures. For more than twenty-five years, she has explored the subtle relationships between constituent elements, attending to the transformative potential that emerges through their combination.
Kretschmer’s process is as much one of construction as it is of painting. Her works are built through the layering of plywood, parchment, and successive strata of gesso, forming custom-made supports that are often unified by soft, opaque white tonalities. Using woodworking tools, she incises fine reliefs and fissures into the surface, embedding beeswax within these cuts. This method produces a nuanced integration of foreground, background, and edge, allowing the works to register simultaneously as paintings and as objects that unfold spatially through their sculptural depth.
While she does not identify as a colorist, Kretschmer orchestrates a complex interplay of textures, employing transparency, translucency, opacity, and liquidity. Light becomes an active element within the work, establishing a reciprocal relationship with material. Her work has been exhibited widely, including presentations at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, and the Miami Art Museum.
Kretschmer has collaborated with Konrad Fischer Galerie since her first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2005. Her works are held in numerous public collections, including the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Allianz, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the University of California, Los Angeles; FNAC, Paris; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.