Merrill Wagner
Biography:
Merrill Wagner was born in 1935 in Tacoma, Washington. She completed her BA at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, in 1957 before moving to New York City. Since the 1960s, Wagner 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.
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 By the time she completed her studies in 1963, minimalism and post-minimalism had superseded abstract expressionism as the dominant aesthetic idioms, and Wagner both eschewed and embraced their primary concerns, creating rigorous, hard-edged abstract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 landscape.
By the mid 1970s, Wagner abandoned canvas and looked to non-traditional materials such as slate, steel, and stone as a support. These surfaces interested Wagner not only because of their textural appearance, but also because of their allusions to the natural world, resonant with her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, and their inherent connection to process and chance. In integrating the support within the compositional logic of her works, ordering and joining fragments by adding exquisitely considered painted elements, at first in geometric formations and later in colorful, allover compositions, Wagner poetically mediates between the natural and the constructed.
AAA:
Member Since: 1976
President: 1982–1985
