Untitled

Merrill Wagner, who came of age as an artist in the 1960s, works across the categories of painting, sculpture, and installation. Over the course of her long career, she has consistently engaged a wide range of subjects, including landscape (both urban and natural), materiality, duration, metamorphosis, and abstraction. Wagner employs both natural and industrial materials, most of them either reclaimed and/or originally intended for extra-artistic purposes. Such is true of the painting Untitled, which exemplifies the artist’s longstanding fascination with steel, which she began to embrace in the 1990s. A painting that hangs on the wall with magnets, Untitled consists of a single sheet of thick, industrially milled steel onto which the artist has applied, about halfway down, two stripes of Rust-Oleum paint that she purchased from a hardware store. The stripes, sandwiched between areas of bare steel, are of varying degrees of density and opacity, with an opaque black stripe resting on top of a light gray stripe. The colors are essentially pre-determined, limited to what was available in the Rust-Oleum inventory at the time. As a product made specifically for steel, Rust-Oleum is, of course, well suited to Wagner’s medium of choice at the conceptual, chemical, and chromatic levels. The black and gray, for instance, draws out the inherent tones, patterns, and gradations of the steel slab, whose appearance results directly from the vagaries of the process that brought it into being. Untitled is a kind of composite object that includes attributes both readymade and appended. Overall, Wagner works here, as elsewhere, in a deductive manner, taking her initiative, so to speak, from her primary material and making additions that respond to the notion, use value, and appearance of steel, a way of working very much in keeping with the artistic context in which she operated in the 1960s and 1970s.