Tanya Merrill
Sofo pregnant, painting
Lot Closed
August 5, 06:36 PM GMT
Estimate
50,000 - 70,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Tanya Merrill
b. 1987
Sofo pregnant, painting
Oil and graphite on linen
50 by 76 in.
127 by 193 cm
Executed in 2023.
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Kindly donated by the artist and 303 Gallery, New York
Tanya Merrill’s work invents narratives to examine humanity’s fraught relationship to nature and cultural portrayals of gender and sexuality through her own contemporary lens. Fantastic, consequential, and at times humorous scenes are populated by animals and characters caught amidst moments of introspection, fervor, or mischief. Gesture and movement are punctuated by sketched lines, lending her canvases a sense of effervescence and immediacy. Reinterpreting motifs drawn from throughout art history, Merrill imbues a sense of familiarity to her storytelling as a means to decode 21st century concerns. Symbols and imagery make repeat appearances from one work to the next, building a mythology of personas and environments.
Tanya Merrill was born in New York City in 1987. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Columbia University. Merrill had a solo presentation as part of Parcours at The Museum Of Natural History, Basel in 2023, solo exhibitions at 303 Gallery, New York and The Pond Society, Shanghai in 2021, and also a solo exhibition
at the Pond Half Gallery, New York in 2020. Recent group exhibitions include Blum and Poe, Los Angeles; Gagosian Gallery, New York; and Clearing, New York. Merrill lives and works in New York City.
On the present work:
“It’s an imagined self portrait, of Sofonisba Anguissola, one of the very few female Renaissance painters, pregnant. The land- scape in the background is based on one of her paintings she did when she was in her 20’s where she lived with her family in Northern Italy” - Tanya Merrill