Stand close to Ingo Meller’s paintings and you can almost hear their rasp. Each brushstroke is a strident expression of intent and resolve. His predominantly wide brushes approach the generous linen fields fully loaded, discharging their consignment in urgent gestures that are liberated from any obligation to advertise or flaunt their expedition.
These bold and deliberate gestures feel made to counter the obvious charisma that seduces many painters and vulnerable audiences. In fact, so unbridled by dramatic imperative, the initial sense one has is that this exchange between Meller and his raw linen is so fundamental that there is little room for us as participant. The dance feels binary by nature and how and if we might successfully ‘cut in’ is unclear.
But what Meller does give us between these rasping notes is space, plenty of it. As articulated as the spare composition appears, the field, particularly with its open edges, offers a symbolically boundless territory, emancipated from the restrictions and orthodoxies of folded stretchers and authoritative frames. In this sense alone, they are more available.
AJ 2024
I wrote the above late last year after finally visiting Ingo’s studio – but my first knowledge of Ingo Meller’s paintings came, in retrospect, through my early contact with Günter Umberg and his singular, visionary project Raum für Malerie. Between 1982 and 1988, Umberg ran a discrete, non-commercial “Space for Painting” in Cologne, where international artists like Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, Alan Uglow, Gotthard Graubner and Keith Sonnier had solo exhibitions. Amongst the artists Umberg presented was Ingo Meller in 1985.
More often than not Raum Für Malerie’s presentations obliged the audience to engage with a single painting in a single room. The implications of being placed in direct relationship with a painting may be liberating for some and confronting for others – obliged to have at least something to think or feel, if not to say. In a sense, exhibitions involving broader installations that are the norm, discharge us from the provocation that such an unwavering dialogue between an object and an audience establishes.
AJ 2014
Rather than discomfort at being placed in such an unavoidably binary relationship with painting, Raum für Malerie simply laid bare the facts and you either apprehended them or not. This prosaic comprehension of making, installing and seeing a painting is hugely germane to Meller’s paintings - paintings where the pressures of entertainment and narrative indulgence are so discredited to allow the principal structures of painting to be demonstrated.
In 1998, curator, David Moos described Meller’s work - “a specified and limited number of colours has been applied to each canvas. The strokes move in two directions: some cross with other strokes, while some remain nearly autonomous. This system of constitution and application, although initially appearing codified and rigidly restrained, paradoxically provides for vast possibilities of gestural inflection.”
In this newest installation of Meller’s works at Fox Jensen McCrory – where discrete paintings with an episodic physicality, an “unhinged” life, are installed either pinned directly to the wall, or rely on their travel cases to buttress their liberated ‘fabric’.
Yet for all their apparent abandoning of sturdy ‘cedar’ architecture, a newer physical presence is soon evident, where a kind of atomic frisson between brushstrokes and indeed between the cut linen coalesce, not in the service of orthodox composition but to establish a charged magnetic field where elements are held in excited motion.
Ingo Meller has exhibited extensively in Europe and in the USA. This is the first exhibition that Ingo Meller has had with Fox Jensen & Fox Jensen McCrory, and we are delighted that Ingo will be in New Zealand for the opening reception.