“I strongly identify with the importance of change as a commitment to my visual art and way of working. Through gesture, line, shape-making, and color, I have experimented in different scales, formats, materials, and approaches, and yet there is a thread that is consistent throughout these changes, a particular energy I make visible. My goal is to continue to reinvent myself without severing my connections to Abstract Expressionism, more particularly, to the brushstroke and drawing in paint.” -Melissa Meyer
Melissa Meyer is an American artist known for her calligraphic abstract paintings. From the earliest stages of her career, Meyer has been creating fluid, gestural compositions of harmonious, sumptuous color in all-over patterns, navigating line and form with a graceful touch. Seemingly loose, unbridled brushstrokes are reigned in by an underlying grid pattern which brings an inherent orderliness to the organic structure of her work.
“When I’m painting, restrictions are self-imposed, including choices about color, scale, speed of mark, and format. Variation in these approaches allows me to stay true to the threads that connect my work — the visual energy of a collage sensibility and the expressiveness of a painting.” -Melissa Meyer
Born on May 4, 1946 in Bronx, NY, she received both her BS and MA from New York University, where she came under the influence of Helen Frankenthaler. Meyer’s first solo exhibition took place in 1976, her subsequent and frequent solo shows included major cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Zurich. She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her paintings have been written extensively about by a number of artists, including Stephen Westfall and Robert Storr.
Meyer received a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1980, two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1983, 1993), the National Academy 183rd Invitational Eric Isenburger Annual Award (2008) and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2009). In the late 1970s Meyer and Miriam Schapiro collaborated on a Heresies article entitled Femmage. In 1997 her sketchbooks were published in facsimile by the Mezzanine Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Melissa Meyer’s paintings and works on paper are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Jewish Museum, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The National Academy Museum. Meyer teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Melissa currently paints and resides in New York.
