Melissa Gordon / Myopia ‒ Melissa Gordon
-Melissa Gordon is a painter who also works with installation and writing in an extensive career focused on the behaviors of gesture.
For each of the new paintings titled Myopic View on display, Gordon visited an artist’s studio and photographed the view to outside. With a nod to the first recorded photograph and early modernist paintings which use the motif of a window to the outside as a framing device, Gordon transforms the exterior view to an imaginative space of painterly abstraction — an unknown world interrupting our own.
Each of the silkscreened windows arise from a specific story: for the larger paintings, Gordon visited a number of modernist studios in Paris that had been purpose-built in the late 1920s and were subsequently abandoned as their female artist occupants fled persecution during WWII. In a parallel gesture, new works in the series are photographed from inside her female peers´ studios in Brussels.
Layered on the larger paintings are surfaces that aesthetically echo Gordon’s recent monoprints, also on display, that focus on an accumulation of marks and objects, layered, thickening densities, often beginning with images of collapse or erasure. Written elements and maps tell anonymous first-person accounts of frustrated movement across borders create a time-shift.
In her monotypes, titled Informe or ‘formless’, Gordon has repeatedly run the paper through different presses, dropping leaves, trash and liquids in order to capture a feeling of forms emerging from underneath a surface.
The term myopia refers to short-sightedness, or inability to see far in front of one-self, and in Gordon’s exhibited paintings and prints, she plays with this interruption and confusion both materially and narratively.
Melissa Gordon is an American and British artist based in Belgium. She was born in Boston in 1981 and attended the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, 2002 and was a participant at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, 2003 – 2005.
Recent institutional solo exhibitions include 'Vital Signs', Kunsthall Oslo (2023), 'Liquid Gestures', Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK (2021), and ‘Derivative Value,’ Kunstverein Luebeck, DE, 'Routine Pleasures', Vleeshal, Middleburg, NL, 'Material Evidence', Spike Island, Bristol, UK, as well as exhibition participations 'Re-Inventing Piet. Mondrian and the consequences' Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wilhelm Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (2022-23), CON10UR Biennial, Mechelen (2023), ‘10 Women’, MuHKA, Antwerp (2023), 'Biennial of Painting - Inner Spaces', Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, BE (2020), ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ GARAGE, Rotterdam (2020), 'Something Stronger Than Me', Wiels, Brussels, BE (2018), 'Art&Press', Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin/ZKM, Karlsruhe (2012), and 'Compilation III', Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 'The Art of Collecting', Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.
Her recent book of works and collected writings titled Vital Signs was published by Occasional Papers and Frans Masereel Centrum in 2023. It follows two monographs: Material Evidence with Sternberg Press in 2013 and Painting Behind Itself in 2016.
Works by Melissa Gordon can be found in institutional and private collections:
MMKA Museum Arnhem, NL, ABN AMRO, NL, ING Bank, NL, Philara Collection, Düsseldorf, Hildebrand Collection, Leipzig, Zabludowicz Collection, London, Sender Collection, New York, EKARD Collection, The Hague
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left:
Melissa Gordon, Myopic View (1928 / 2021), 2023
200 cm x 180 cm, silkscreen, acrylic and pigment on canvas
right:
left: Melissa Gordon, Myopic View (1930 / 2022), 2023
200 cm x 180 cm, silkscreen, acrylic and pigment on canvas -
Melissa Gordon, Myopic View (1930 / 2022), 2023
200 cm x 180 cm, silkscreen, acrylic and pigment on canvas -
Melissa Gordon, Installation view 'Myopia'
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Melissa Gordon, Myopic View (Brussels, Annaik), 2024
150 cm x 150 cm, silkscreen, acrylic and pigment on canvas -
Melissa Gordon, Myopic View (Brussels, Manon), 2024
125 cm x 140 cm, silkscreen, acrylic and pigment on canvas -
Melissa Gordon, Installation view 'Myopia'
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Melissa Gordon, Installation view 'Myopia'
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Melissa Gordon, Installation view 'Myopia'