Merrill Wagner Reviewed in Artforum

The two bodies of work by American artist Merrill Wagner, shown on two floors, appeared so distinct as to be almost irreconcilable. Downstairs, glossy fields of dark browns and greens on large steel plates hung on the walls. In one such painting—Finnegans Lane, 1990, an imposing work of eight by twelve feet—a layer of emerald, a green of an otherworldly density, was flanked by strips of raw steel that looked like cross sections of an agate. On the floor sat Untitled, 1996, a cluster of stones marked with blue paint, and Crooked Strait, 1995, a narrow path of irregular pieces of slate shot through with a thin line of white oil pastel. This style, somewhere between Minimalism and Land art, is that most associated with the artist, whose practice spans an impressive six decades. Wagner shares with the latter movement a concern with how materials are affected by time and the environment, yet her art has a different vulnerability to it: a humility that is surprising, given the apparent roughness and scale of the works. The effect is one of solemnity, a rare kind of dignity.

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