Tanya Merrill — 303 Gallery, New York
Tanya Merrill projects onto our modernity the traces of an art history where human postures, rigid or lascivious, extend through our portable windows onto the world, adding to the classical perspective the tunnel of possibilities offered by these digital reflections.
In line with the title of her second solo exhibition, “Watching women give birth on the internet and other ways of looking,” her exhibition at the 303 Gallery in New York explores the very origin of life, comfortably seated behind the screen.
Through her figurative painting, with undeniable efficiency and expressiveness, she depicts a universe of vanities where self-staging engages in a direct relationship with the other. Borrowing symbols from various registers of society (sports, religion, advertising, technology) that she intertwines within human-scale compositions, she offers a narrative framework that compiles joyful scenes, languorous domestic afternoons where solitude appears as a deserved break, and the companionship of pets an end in itself.
Rich in references and attaching itself, while defining the limits of this representation that only extends those of glorious ancestors, her pictorial work renders a strange sincerity of joy, diversion, and humor whose conjunction, purely enjoyable and delicately mischievous, is quite rare. From the announcement of fertility to the macabre and laughing dance of skeletons, it is both a life cycle and a sharp chronicle of our existence to which Tanya Merrill confronts us.
For it is indeed this double movement of an excessive relationship of humanity to nature that appears throughout her compositions, allowing to confuse the use it makes of it as an object but above all how, as a subject, it tries to shape a bias that, by diverting it, leads itself to paths as unknown as incongruous.
Tanya Merrill, Watching women give birth on the internet and other ways of looking, 303 Gallery, New York, from April 14 to May 18, 2024 — "More about the exhibition"://www.303gallery.com/
