NYAB Event - Merrill Wagner "Thoughts of Form and Color"

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At Sundaram Tagore Gallery
Media: Painting

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Gallerist Sudaram Tagore stated, "The power of Merrill Wagner's work emerges from the inherent tension between the industrial and the natural that endows the work with a certain power."

Wagner's oeuvre explores the possibility of steel and slate as a painterly surface. Wagner begins with found materials, either die-cut scraps of steel, or pieces of slate, and transforms them into abstract landscapes or flowers. She imbues the surface with an unexpected softness yet still maintains an architectural form. Painted directly from nature, her forms allude less overtly to geometry than to a structural topography. Her assemblages are suspended by magnets giving them a floating quality. Her innovative utilization of the dichotomy between the softness of the pigments and her subject and the rigidity of her surface has earned her the acclaim of the art world.

Roger Boyce noted of her work in Art in America, "The material gravity and the anonymous aesthetic of the industrially manufactured [materials] stand in for the assertive indifference and receptive sublimity of nature."

Robert C. Morgan wrote, "There is an illusory aspect to these steel surfaces created through paint, a tangential relationship of the planes, and a fixing of their physical supports."

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