Konrad Fischer Galerie is very pleased to present the current exhibition of Merrill Wagner, already the third solo show of the New York-based artist, featuring works on steel and stone as well as small-scale landscape paintings.
As early as the early 1980s, Merrill Wagner began to execute her color paintings with oil and pastel paints on slate panels, sometimes arranging them into fan-shaped floor works or multi-part wall panels. In part, these color interventions are created directly in nature, found on rocks, house walls, or garden fences. Some of these stone formations are covered with a fine, geometric mesh of chalk lines. The colored surfaces from the 1990s, applied by means of rust-protective paints to hot-rolled, often multi-part steel plates, are also initially reminiscent of Minimal Art or Neo-Constructivist painting, but can also be read as landscape impressions from the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where the artist spent her childhood and youth. Since the mid-1990s, parallel to the works on stone and steel, the artist has been creating small plein-air paintings in oil on canvas, inspired by stays on her farm in Pennsylvania. The fine, sometimes intensely colored landscapes, views of individual trees, bushes and flowering meadows are painted in the great outdoors.
Merrill Wagner's work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Microsoft Corporation, in Redmond, WA, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, among others.
