One doesn’t know, initially, how often Merrill Wagner painted these paintings and how often they painted her. The hallmark of a true artist is someone who meets the material and the idea to be embodied in it halfway, and in so doing allows the material to speak and renders its qualities visible.
At the top of the stairs at the Zwirner galleries on 69th street, Watch (1992), a monumental steel painting, inhabits the foyer and the stairwell. Its unexpected gradation of bands holds the space—assertively. The darkest one takes command—from there you can cascade down the gradient or, alternately, pierce the clean edge above to enter a field whose subtle lines trace the surface of a sea. Either way, the sensation of multiple horizons emerges with vistas.