Archive Merion Estes

Catalogue Essay | Artist Interview | Images from the Exhibition Merion Estes Home Page | Fall 2006 Archive

A Sea of Possibilities
Paintings by Merion Estes 1971 to 2006

	Toxic Depths, 2004 Fabric, oil, acrylic on panel 80 x 60²

This exhibition spans more than thirty years of work by one of Southern California’s most accomplished, yet under-recognized, artists, Merion Estes. Including a selection of Estes’s mature paintings and examples from all bodies of work completed since 1971, the exhibition examines the enduring legacy and far-reaching artistic vision of an extraordinary artist. It anchors Estes within the rich, if tumultuous, decade of 1970s art and demonstrates how Estes expanded upon 1970s influences to create a unique body of work.

A virtuosic painter whose philosophical interests lie in the interactions between nature, culture, beauty, and decoration, Estes constructs works that dazzle with their technical skill—sensuous surfaces, vibrant colors, collaged layers, and varied paint styles. Since her earliest work from the 1970s, Estes has rigorously investigated painting’s potential for beauty, exploring the decorative impulse in both abstraction and nature-based imagery. Underlying Estes’s work from the beginning is an interest in the connections between nature, beauty, and landscape; she cites her primary influences as nature and twentieth-century painting—early Modernists like Georgia O’Keefe, Agnes Pelton, and Arthur Dove; Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Pat Steir, Jennifer Bartlett, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others.

This exhibition explores Estes’s work in reverse chronological order, by showcasing the mature work in this gallery; a transitional series, “Soundings,” that bridge the early and mature work in the hallway; and work from 1971 to 1992 in the south gallery. The earliest works on view, a vinyl painting and related drawings, were completed between 1971 and 1977. The vinyl paintings, a series of sheets of layered vinyl embellished with spray-painted Minimalist grids reflected 1970s Process, Conceptual, and Feminist concerns with materials, systems, and decorative impulses. In the early 1980s, her work shifted to gridded glitter paintings that reference the “pattern and decoration” movement. Following the glitter paintings, she began to explore the sensuous materiality of paint and to incorporate more organic elements, venturing towards landscape references and merging abstraction and representation. Her “Soundings” series of 1993-94 marked an experimental phase where Estes played with paint application and color relationships (seen in the hallway between galleries).

Her signature style coalesced in 1995 when she combined earlier explorations of color, decoration, landscape, layering, and multiplicity into paintings composed of fabric on panel embellished with collage elements. In these paintings, seen in this gallery, she first began working with a printed fabric ground: here she incorporated patterning; the use of collage and paint decals; varied paint gestures; and organic references to fish, sea creatures, insects, birds, the cosmos, the cellular, etc. Through the use of abstract content and decorative patterns, the mature work allowed for a deeper engagement with complex nature-based imagery and vital expressions concerning the state of the world. Estes’s work comments on our ambivalent relationship to nature—the anxiety and fragility of existence along with the beauty and energy found in every living thing.

This exhibition has the distinction of being the artist’s first retrospective, the accompanying catalogue the first of its kind to be devoted to her. The title of Estes’s exhibition—“A Sea of Possibilities”—is taken from the title of her 1976 vinyl painting (no longer extant), and evokes the beauty and sublimity in nature’s infinite abundance. The exhibition attempts to convey the scope of Estes’s artistic endeavor—the vastness of her vision; the aesthetic and material complexities of her innovations; the philosophical explorations into our relationships with nature; and her meditations on beauty, femininity, and the sublime.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator