Konrad Fischer Galerie is pleased to present new works by Melissa Kretschmer in her fifth solo exhibition. The paintings of the New York based artist gravitate at the interface between painting and sculpture. In her works on paper, she creates complex, sometimes architectural structures using a wide variety of techniques and materials.
„I think of her practice—a mix of painting, sculpture, and the architectonic—as speculative, a mode of inquiry. She decides upon a set of givens, establishes a theme, and proceeds from there, exploring the countless variations that exist within each set. Considering new materials and searching for new formulations over the years, each work is a unique answer to a question that the artist poses to herself — and to the viewer. There is no rush to conclusions. Slowness is as vital to the making of these works as it is to the viewing of them.
Ultimately, Kretschmer wants each work to possess an inevitability, a sense that it must be made this way and not another. She is always trying to determine what is necessary, what might be extraneous, by adding to it or culling. Over the years, she has become increasingly assured and adventurous, and her recent works are among her most ambitious to date, flourishing several degrees of separation away from their minimalist origins. Her vision is her own, and her point of view, far more contemporary, is not conceptually intransigent. An affinity for order, systems, and serialization has been and continues to be a touchstone, as is the desire for clarity. But she also acknowledges the existence of the undetermined, the inexplicable, the glamour and seduction of that. She juggles divergencies with aplomb, like so many balls in the air, catching them all: the skills of the painter and that of the sculptor; the forthright and the subtle; the simple and the complex; the serious and the playful; the refined and the crude; visual noise and silence. Kretschmer, breaking triumphantly through her “wall,” has once again found a new groove."
- Lilly Wei
