Tanya Merrill @ 303 Gallery, New York

Tanya Merrill

303 Gallery, New York

Through December 18, 2021

303 Gallery presents its first solo exhibition by TANYA MERRILL. With this new body of paintings, Merrill creates a mythological chronology of the natural world, spanning the origins of creation, the development of science, agriculture, art and industry, and the earth’s subsequent destruction.

Using symbolism from centuries of pop culture- including references to Dolly (the first genetically engineered sheep), the Virgin Mother, Galileo’s moon-mapping, and hobbyist beekeeping- Tanya Merrill incorporates a shared history into her riveting and intimate imagination of ecological demise. The artist utilizes art historical reference in aid of her premonition, reflecting on the evidence of human intervention in the record of painting through nods to Balthus, van Dyck, Constable and others.

The exhibition’s conceptual timeline begins with creation, both our world’s confounding beginning and the reverence of human creation that is motherhood and birth. In the first painting (pictured), a crow flies over rural farmland, an imagined origin story of how the world came to be. The crow, an invented subject within Tanya Merrill’s folklore, appears as the all-knowing observer – an enduring witness to society’s manipulation of the land. The verdant countryside is based on the Balthus painting Italian Landscape, now obscured by the artist’s addition of the wise, ushering crow.

Tanya Merrill’s tale continues with a focus on the looming loss of ecological diversity and species decline. Highlights include the painting Ash tree before it faced extinction, which comments on the fated history of the ash tree in North America, currently in rapid decline. Merrill references John Constable’s paintings of the Ash tree from the 1800s, and contemplates how in the coming years, his work could document an extinct fauna.

The exhibition delves further into a conceptualized, and disturbing, end of times – the product of societal ravage and earth’s biological disruption. Merrill’s timeline concludes with the painting The last fish on earth. Harkening Jan van Kessel the Elder’s Still life with fish in the harbor and the history of maritime art, Tanya Merrill’s memento mori reflects on the ocean crisis. Vesuvius, contrastingly, depicts the erupting volcano, mid-roar. The artist notes that while humans cannot rise from volcanic ash, ferns and algae do eventually emerge from the veil of soot left behind.

TANYA MERRILL

Tanya Merrill’s work invents narratives to examine humanity’s fraught relationship to nature and cultural portrayals of gender and sexuality through her own contemporary lens. Fantastic, consequential, and at times humorous scenes are populated by animals and characters caught amidst moments of introspection, fervor, or mischief. Gesture and movement are punctuated by sketched lines, lending her canvases a sense of effervescence and immediacy. Reinterpreting motifs drawn from throughout art history, Tanya Merrill imbues a sense of familiarity to her storytelling to decode 21st century concerns. Symbols and imagery make repeat appearances from one work to the next, building a mythology of personas and environments.

Tanya Merrill was born in New York City in 1987. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Columbia University. Merrill presented a solo exhibition at Half Gallery, New York in 2020, and a solo exhibition at The Pond Society Shanghai in Summer 2021. Recent group exhibitions include Blum and Poe, Los Angeles; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and Clearing, New York. Tanya Merrill lives and works in New York City.

303 GALLERY

555 W 21 Street, New York, NY 10011

www.303gallery.com

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Charlie Billingham, Alexander Harrison, Andrea Joyce Heimer, Esteban Jefferson, Tanya Merrill @ Kasmin Gallery, NYC - New Old Histories

New Old Histories 

Charlie Billingham, Alexander Harrison, Andrea Joyce Heimer, 

Esteban Jefferson, Tanya Merrill 

Kasmin Gallery, New York 

May 21 - June 26, 2021 

History is not an objective accounting of events. Rather, it is a series of stories told and retold in an effort to shape the world according to the whims and agendas of real people, as well as by the cultural conditions of a particular time and place. Histories are created, disseminated, and passed down, but they are also altered, forgotten, and re-shaped. New Old Histories presents five artists whose approaches to contemporary representational painting abound in narrative and allegory, developing our understanding of what is at stake in how—and by whom—these stories are told. The artists variously co-opt, critique, and upend conventions of historical painting, and in the process provide a lens through which to view the world today.

CHARLIE BILLINGHAM’S (b. 1984, London, UK) boisterous paintings, screens, and interior installations appropriate imagery from the satirical prints of Regency England. Men in undone formalwear and powdered wigs are disconnected from their original contexts so that the absurd, comic, and grotesque become snapshots of bestial inclinations. The artist’s technical approach focuses on pigment, texture, and surface, using both oil and acrylic paint on surfaces of polyester, linen, tapestry, canvas, or wood panel.

Charlie Billingham lives and works in London, UK. He completed his joint honors MA at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art in 2008, and received a postgraduate degree from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2013. His work is in permanent collections at Saatchi Collection, London, UK; Ramin Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE; Franks-Suss Collection, London, UK; and HSBC Collection, London, UK.

New York-based painter ALEXANDER HARRISON (b. 1992, Greenville, South Carolina) draws on his experiences growing up as a young Black man in the South to explore isolation, longing, and loneliness. Blending references from American cinema, literature, and illustration, with surrealist symbols such as flower heads, the moon, and dislocated limbs, Harrison’s Southern landscapes, often set at dusk, are populated by Black cowboys. Commonly erased by popular culture depicting the South, these figures propose ways in which we might re-emphasize acts of Black heroism in America, and their attire also hints at personal narratives—Harrison notes that his own grandfather often sported a cowboy hat. These inclusions from the artist’s past do not constitute an easy invitation to enter into over-familiarity, however. Utilizing trompe l’oeil framing devices that double as windowpanes or prison bars, Harrison creates portals that establish an immutable distance between subject and viewer, reasserting the melancholic tenor of the themes presented.

Alexander Harrison has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fisher Parrish Gallery, New York, and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.

ANDREA JOYCE HEIMER’S (b. 1981, Great Falls, Montana) paintings evoke narrative friezes and tapestries, adopting a flattened perspective that speaks to a simultaneity of experience. Her work contains complex, imaginative and original use of symbolic figures and iconography, referencing the Garden of Eden and Greek mythology, while also creating and recording personal mythologies. At the center is a curiosity regarding the subject of loneliness, and her interest in origins—of the universe, of narrative art—respond to the obscurity surrounding her own young life.

Andrea Joyce Heimer lives and works in Ferndale, Washington. She received an MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art and has held teaching appointments at Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland), Western Washington University (Bellingham), and Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver).

In his Petit Palais series, ESTEBAN JEFFERSON’S (b. 1989, New York) vaporous canvases depict the sepia-toned art museum in Paris. The artist’s ethereal pencil strokes on brown-stained linen sketch out the museum’s lobby, in which bronze 19th century busts of unidentified African men and women are presented with no details regarding subject, authorship, or provenance. Separated from the Greek sculptures and uncontextualized, the works pose a multitude of questions regarding the colonialist conventions of museum display. Jefferson’s paintings, in response, query whom in art history receives the privilege of being remembered.

Esteban Jefferson lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Petit Palais at Tanya Leighton, Berlin, in 2019, and an exhibition of the same name at White Columns, New York, in 2020. Also in 2020, as part of Art Production Funds’ citywide exhibition, 50 Artists: Art on the Grid, Jefferson presented an artwork across New York City’s transportation system. In 2021, the artist will present two major paintings at The Shed, New York, for the institution’s Open Call commission.

Three paintings by TANYA MERRILL (b. 1987, New York City) imaginatively examine humankind’s fraught relationship with nature and the paradoxical drives toward both consumption and conservation. Mining narratives from the development of the ecology of the United States, including the blight of the American chestnut tree, they are populated by sympathetic and symbolic non-human figures such as a feeding sow and the charcoal flames of a fireplace. Merrill renders the subtle movement of both with effervescence and immediacy, drawing on motifs from the art historical canon in order to use storytelling as a means to decode 21st-century concerns. Symbols and imagery make repeated appearances from one work to the next, building a mythology of personas and environments.

Tanya Merrill lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from Columbia in 2018 and has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Half Gallery as well as participating in group exhibitions at 303 Gallery, New York; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and Almine Rech, London. In 2021, Merrill will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Pond Society, Shanghai.

KASMIN GALLERY

509 West 27th Street, New York, NY

www.kasmingallery.com

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