Betty Merken
In her show titled Continuum, Betty Merken continues to explore her signature color-saturated minimalist vision, presenting prints and paintings alongside sculpture. Created from hundreds of hand deckled, hand inked, and hand printed papers, Betty Merken’s innovative new sculptures intersect with her more familiar two-dimensional work. Slab Series, Citron, Cantilevered. #10-16-05, a teetering stack of hundreds of glowing yellow prints, solidifies Merken’s exploration into blurring the lines between printmaking and sculpture. Also notable is a large-scale gridded wall installation comprised of hundreds of gouache on paper paintings, which the artist created during a recent artist residency in Andalusia, Spain.
Betty Merken lives and works in Seattle, Washington. She is a painter and printmaker whose abstract geometric monotypes and paintings recall the early Modernist works of Piet Mondrian and the work of American artists such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko, often echoing freedoms of painterly gesture pioneered by the Abstract Expressionists. Her work can be found in several galleries and in numerous private and public collections in the United States, Asia, and Europe, and in the permanent collections of several major museums, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon. Merken has been honored with fellowships from the BAU Institute and the Northwest Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Italy. She is the co-author, with Stefan Merken, of Wall Art, Megamurals and Supergraphics (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1987).