MERRILL WAGNER
Selected Works
March 4 – March 27
We are pleased to welcome celebrated artist Merrill Wagner back to Traver Gallery for a concise exhibition of paintings. An important figure in abstract and minimalist art, Wagner works in a wide range of media, including drawing, painting, time-based projects, book works, and sculptural interventions. She manipulates materials to create artwork about the passing of time and material transformation, aligning her work with both the principles of minimalism and the ethics of an alchemist. This exhibition features a curated selection of steel, slate, and plexiglass works created over four decades, highlighting the breadth of Wagner’s explorations in abstraction and materiality.
Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Wagner arrived in New York City in the late 1950s and has maintained an active studio practice there ever since. She is recognized internationally for her paintings that emphasize the materiality and malleability of the paint itself, the artist’s gesture, and natural phenomena. Robert Storr describes her in his essay Matters of Fact and Vision: “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.”
Wagner has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including Landscapes of Colour/Landschaften der Farbe Große Kunstschau, Worpswede, Germany (2019); and Merrill Wagner at New York Studio School, (2016). Her first traveling survey Looking at the Land, was mounted at the Ben Shahn Gallery, William Paterson University (2006), before traveling to the University of Rhode Island in 2007. Group exhibitions include Postwar Women at The Art Students League of New York (2019); Between the Lines: American Abstract Artists Women’s Exhibition, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2018); Minimal Difference: Selected Work by Women Artists 1960s-1970s, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, New York (2018); and American Abstract Artists: a Selection, Kent State University, Ohio (2013), among many others. Her numerous site-specific works also include Runaway Redyellowblue at the C.W. Post Center at Long Island University, New York (1993); Painted Sun Trails at William Paterson College, Wayne, New Jersey (1994); and Skewer presented at the Islip Art Museum in New York (2002).
For additional information, please contact Traver Gallery at 206.587.6501 or info@travergallery.com