Tower Road

Merrill Wagner explores a variety of industrial materials for their implicit qualities as a ground for her poetic and lyrical paintings.  Her compositions juxtapose the subtleties and nuances of surface color.  Her opaque paint or pastel strokes ground the work and creates a tension between references to landscape painting and abstract painting.  

Wagner’s creative process is rooted in her education at New York’s Arts Student League in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when Abstract Expressionism was giving way to the Minimalist art of the 1970s.  She is a formalist, however, approaching her image-making process with deliberation and informed mark-making balanced by an acceptance of chance and accident.

Location: Floor 40