Material Evidence (Table), installation
view Painting Behind Itself, 2016, acrylic
on linen, wallpaper of rubbing of studio
wall
Courtesy the artist and Cosar HMT,
Düsseldorf (DE)
Artist's talks
Melissa Gordon
18.07.2017 18:00 / The gesture is a fluid
Location: Galerie 5020
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Language: English
Location: Residenzplatz 10, 5020 SalzburgMelissa Gordon’s talk will focus on her recent work and writing on the fluid nature of gestures, in her own paintings, silkscreens and installations as well as in her research and recent essays, which take as their subjects the negative gestures of withdrawal, the question of confidence, what a female genius looks like, and her thinking around luxury goods.
Gordon’s work asks the question “Who gets to be abstract?” In paintings of the ‘abstract’ gestures on her studio surfaces in the ongoing series Material Evidence, Gordon’s paintings hang in photographic relationships: zooms, pans and time-lapses, envisioning gesture as something material and imagined. Her new body of work of large-scale silkscreens, as documents of ‘cleaning’ specific architectural elements, hang back into the architecture, alongside wallpapers made of rubbings, and unfinished false walls. Her installations are a re-arrangement of space, touched and reproduced. -
Melissa Gordon born in Boston (US) in 1981, lives and works in London. She is a painter, printmaker and editor, whose work encompasses painted and silkscreened objects, installations, performances and feminist magazines. In painting and silkscreen series that play with forms of abstraction, by mimicking residual marks on studio surfaces or forensically investigating ageing male modernist paintings, Gordon’s work turns the question of abstraction and gesture on its head. Her installations and architectural interventions in exhibitions are concerned with the “staging” of objects. Gordon is the editor of an ongoing series of feminist publications and events. She is a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London.
Solo exhibitions
2016 Painting Behind Itself, Cosar HMT, Dusseldorf. Routine Pleasures, Vleeshal, Middelburg (NL). Derivative Value, Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck (DE). Fallible Space, The Bluecoat, Liverpool (UK). 2015 WE (Not I), Artists Space, New York, NY (US). 2014 Mimetic Pleasures, Boesky East, New York. ZOOOOOM, Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam (NL). 2013 Material Evidence, Spike Island, Bristol (UK).
Group exhibitions
2016 Modern Talk, Deweer Gallery, Otegem (BE). 2014 During the exhibition, the studio will be close, Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. 2013 HERstories, Bonner Kunstverein (DE). Specific Collisions, Marianne Boesky, New York. 2012 Parallax Curtain, S1 Artspace, Sheffield (UK). Art & Press, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (DE), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin.
Publications
Roos Gortzak, Oliver Zybok (eds.), Painting Behind Itself, Revolver Press, Berlin 2016.Lorenzo Benedetti, Caroline Dumalin (eds.), During the exhibition, the studio will be close, Motto Books, Berlin 2014.
Marie-Anne McQuay (ed.), Material Evidence, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2014.
Melissa Gordon and Marina Vishmidt (eds.), PERSONA, Archive Books, Berlin 2013.
Will Holder and Melissa Gordon (eds.), Specific Collisions, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 2013.