Merrill Wagner

Since the 1960s, American artist Merrill Wagner (b. 1935) has created a distinctive body of work that is characterized by its expansive approach to abstraction, existing between the categories of painting, relief, sculpture, and installation. Born in Washington state, Wagner came to New York City in 1959 to study at the Art Students League, training under figurative painters Edwin Dickinson, Julien Levi, and George Grosz. By the time she completed her studies in 1963, minimalism and post-minimalism had superseded abstract expressionism as the dominant aesthetic idioms, and Wagner both eschewed and embraced their primary concerns, creating rigorous, hard-edged abstract compositions that subtly referenced the genre of landscape. By the mid-1970s, the artist largely moved away from canvas and looked to nontraditional supports as surfaces for color. These alternative substrates interested Wagner not only for their textural appearance but also for their allusions to the natural world and their inherent connection to process and chance. Her Pacific Northwest upbringing is resonant throughout her practice, and she has continued to make work outdoors throughout her career. By integrating the support within the compositional logic of her works, and ordering and joining fragments by adding painted elements, Wagner poetically mediates between the natural and the constructed.