Melissa Gordon

Melissa Gordon’s approach to painting is intellectual and experimental, and it has bodily and performative aspects too. Her painting course will examine the role of gesture in abstract painting; although it has always been regarded as the direct expression of a creative force, today it can be explored in its historical significance as a rhetorical figure and restaged anew. The students will use everything they come across, home-made tools, found objects, silkscreens, their bodies and paint to make gestures, in space as well as on painting.
 

(Photo taken at Melissa Gordon's course, Summer Academy in 2016) 

In her own work the London-based american artist implements her particular cache of gestures - enlarging hidden details, zooming in on patterns of reproduction, and distorting information with abstraction - to reconfigure histories, surfaces, and iconographies through a feminist lens. She takes a humorous and insightful stance vis-à-vis modernist art history.