Contemporary Art Matters is pleased to present Melissa Meyer: Gesture, a solo exhibition of her lyrical abstract paintings and collages. The exhibition highlights a key painting from the 1980s alongside recent works, offering a comparison that reveals the evolution of her practice toward a lighter yet powerful touch. In these paintings, her experienced hand channels emotional, pastoral, and urban energy through free-flowing, script-like gestures and transparent washes of color that glow like stained glass. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s 243 N. 5th Street, Columbus, OH, location from September 11 through October 31, 2025, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 11, from 5 to 7 PM.

Melissa Meyer began her career in the early 1970s, in the wake of the influential Abstract Expressionist movement. Invited by Helen Frankenthaler to participate in the Yaddo artist residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, Meyer was mentored by many of the movement's pioneering women, whose example helped shape her formative years. Living in New York City but returning regularly to Yaddo, Meyer expresses through her work her relationship to these contrasting urban and rural environments. Through playful, improvised, yet assured brushstrokes, a confidence gained through years of daily practice, Meyer gives to us the atmospheric light over the landscape and the bustle of a crowded sidewalk on a busy city block.

In this exhibition, the painting Some other spring (1989) stands out as a remarkable example of Meyer’s earlier work. The paint swirls and drips, with pigments blending directly on the canvas in fluid, dynamic gestures. She applies the thick impasto with a loaded brush, using a rich, opaque palette. One can sense the size of the brush and the movement required to create these flowing marks. This gestural quality has remained a constant throughout her work over the years. As Meyer’s work matured, her paint grew lighter and more translucent, allowing the white ground to illuminate the colors, while her marks became increasingly deliberate, linear, and calligraphic. In Times square (2011), Meyer paints graceful loops that veer back upon themselves in sharp turns, hinting at geometry or even graffiti, and forming characters that restrain themselves within their own space. Arranged in a loose grid, these characters press against one another like dancers in a crowd. Reflecting on her work, Meyer recalled, “I have been interested in the temporal arts - arts that deal with time, like movies, dance, music. One can make an argument for painting as a temporal art but it really isn’t. You can look at a painting in parts and you can look at it all at once; you can’t do that with a piece of music.” This sense of timing, captured in the rhythm of improvised marks, resonates throughout her choreographed works.