Merrill Wagner

(American, born 1935)

Merrill Wagner is an American artist known for her painted wall reliefs made of salvaged steel and linen. Inspired by the shapes she finds in scrapped metal, Wegner evokes natural forms by responding to them with specific colors. “The material gravity and anonymous aesthetic of the industrially manufactured [materials] stand in for the assertive indifference and receptive sublimity of nature,” the critic Roger Boyce wrote of her work. Born in 1935 in Tacoma, WA, she went on to receive her BA from Sarah Lawrence College before moving to New York and studying under Edwin Dickinson and Julian Levi at the Art Students League. In the early 1960s, she experimented with geometric abstraction, before turning her focus on nontraditional painting supports such as stone, steel, and slate. The artist continues to live and work in New York, NY. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, among others.