NEW YORK
Merrill Wagner
Works from the 70’s
May 10, 2017 – June 24, 2017

PRESS:
Brooklyn Rail: “What’s Left Behind” by Will Fenstermaker
Hyperallergic: “Merrill Wagner’s Puzzles in Color and Tape” by Thomas Michelli

Zürcher Gallery is thrilled to present the work of Merrill Wagner. This will be Wagner’s first show at Zürcher Gallery in New York. Born 1935 in the Pacific Northwest, Wagner has lived in New York since 1957. Wagner works in abstraction in a wide range of media. This includes drawing, painting, time-based projects, book works and sculptural interventions. Her work aligns itself with both the principles of Minimalism, and the ethics of an alchemist. She manipulates materials to make works that are about the passing of time and material transformation.

In Works from the 70’s Zürcher Gallery exhibits work from one of her strongest periods. Many of the pieces showcase her unique process with using fabric tape and plexiglass. The exhibit also includes a collection of small-scale work, one installation-based painting, striped works, a quintessential landscape painting, and a cobalt blue Untitled monochrome. Each piece touches on the cornerstones of Wagner’s idiosyncratic process. They all help explain how the role of chance, order, and time, plays into her work.

Wagner considers pigments and supports for their degradation, reaction to light, and effect over time. The work exists only through its transformation in atmosphere rather than its stability. Robert Storr refers to Wagner as a ‘materialist painter’ in his essay Matters of Fact and of Vision. Storr notes that her, “color is never purely spectral and absolute but always the attribute of a particular pigment applied to a particular surface that is subsequently exposed to a particular set of atmospheric conditions and degrees and types of illumination.” The particularities of paint and their application are key to the works from the 1970’s.

Included in the exhibition is a suite of small works. John Yau explains that, “For many of the abstract drawings that Wagner completed between 1971 and 1980, she used graphite on paper, masking tape on board, masking tape and graphite on paper, or straight masking tape on paper. What all there drawings have in common is the absence of a contour line. When Wagner makes a grid of square, or a field of vertical and horizontal lines, or a stack of evenly spaced horizontal bands, what the viewer sees is the artist’s measured distribution of value, evenly spaced across an empty surface. Rather than use a line to make a shape, she presses the pencil or graphite against the paper, making a series of short diagonals whose value is the focus.” This focus on value rather than line continues through her body of work. The paintings and their attributes take up space. They are not merely outlines, their boundaries are less defined. It’s difficult to tell even what form they will begin as and Wagner’s process makes it open what form they will end up. This openness to transformation is a special attribute to her unique vision on the world and in her work.

A large portion of the work at Zürcher Gallery includes paintings made of fabric tape, paint and plexiglass. Tiffany Bell explained aptly that, “In the mid-1970s, Wagner abandoned the conventional use of paint on canvas and introduced other kinds of surfaces and materials into her work. Having used tape as an incidental tool in her painting, she became fascinated with as something to mark on. Her preoccupation with tape led to a consideration of process and the role of chance in the creative procedure. She started applying bands of tape to paper, Plexiglas, or later slate, and marking the resulting surfaces all over with chalk. A second layer of tape was then layered on top, removed, and affixed to Plexiglas. Seen from the opposite side, traces of the original drawing were thus incorporated into a new context.”

Wagner is an artist indicative of her time and place. The small landscape piece in the main room is only a nod to how the American landscape has influenced her way of thinking. Her use of pigments is akin to the color in nature; it is fading, changing, and constantly becoming something new. Robert Storr perfectly summarizes her when he says, “Wagner, materialist, formalist, empiricist, and poet of the given and the accidental as well of the systematically altered is, in this every respect, an all-American artist to the core.”

Merrill Wagner (born 1935 Seattle, Washington) received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1959 – 1963. Wagner has exhibited her work extensively both nationally and internationally, her recent solo exhibitions include : The New York Studio School in 2016; and Konrad Fischer Galerie in Berlin, Germany in 2013. Wagner was also included in 1970’s Women and Abstraction curated by Dr. Barbara Stehle at Zurcher Gallery, NYC in 2016.

She was the recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Prize, National Academy of Design, the Academy Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters both in 2006, and the Hassam Purchase Award, American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2002 amongst others.
Select Public collections include: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Chase Manhattan Bank, NYC; Coopers and Lybrand, Boston, MA; Gemeentemuseum , The Hague, Holland; Richard Gluckman, Architects, NYC; Long Island University, Brookville, NY; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Nicolaysen Museum of Art, Casper, WY; Project Studios One, The Institute for Art and Urban Resourses, Long Island City, NY; Sears Arts Commission, Seattle, WA; Seattle Arts Commission, Seattle, WA; Seattle First National Bank, Seattle, WA; Smith College, Northampton, MA; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; University Museum at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL; Weatherspoon Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; William Paterson College, Wayne, NJ.

A book of Wagner’s work was published in 2016 conjunction with her recent solo exhibition at the New York Studio School including essays by Tiffany Bell, Naomi Spector, Robert Storr, Lilly Wei and John Yau.