EASTBOURNE.- Towner Eastbourne is presenting a series of new works by Melissa Gordon. The presentation, Liquid Gestures, is the largest institutional exhibition of work by the artist to date. Formed of a series of new paintings and installation works, it invites us to reconsider the influence of women artists whose work has been eclipsed in art historical prose.

Gordon is a British and American artist based in Brussels whose practice, as a painter, writer, and organiser, is concerned with the body, gesture, and painting through the lens of feminism. Liquid Gestures features new large-scale paintings that further her examination of modern art histories, ideas of authorship, and the appropriation of certain ‘gestures’.

In Liquid Gestures, Gordon asks us to consider the significance and influence of artists such as Ukrainian-American Abstract Expressionist Janet Sobel in relation to drip painting and Dada artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, in relation to the readymade. Their contributions to art history have been overlooked in a culture of gender inequality that is noticeably persistent even today: Sobel being an artist to use the drip painting technique which directly influenced Jackson Pollock and von Freytag-Loringhoven thought by some to be the original author of Marcel Duchamp's famous readymade, The Fountain.

This is explored by Gordon via a new body of paintings titled Female Readymades, which are being displayed on a complex interior of displaced architectural elements, designed specifically for the exhibition. On this site-specific structure, Gordon inserts and overlaps the architecture of the studios of Sobel and von Freitag Loringhoven, crafting them into temporary metal stud structures. The spaces of these two women who may have been instrumental in two of the 20th century ‘seminal’ art historical gestures - the readymade and the drip - interrupt the gallery spaces at Towner in an attempt to show the instability, liquidity, and moveability of gesture, through time and between artworks.




In the paintings, motifs such as a grid, mesh or chain-link fence, are silk-screened directly onto the canvas, creating a framework that plays host to an array of intriguing references. Photographs and texts are then painted or printed onto the surface, while outlines and silhouettes of painting tools, clothing, and domestic objects slip over and under colourful swathes of paint. Traversing between figuration and abstraction, brushstrokes and pools of colour have been repainted and reproduced from the incidental mark-making on Gordon’s studio wall with an almost forensic examination of gesture.

“The exhibition at Towner Eastbourne is an opportunity to work on two ambitious challenges for my work: to showcase the ‘readymade’ nature of the paintings by developing the notion of gravity and the role of mechanical devices on the paintings such as an LCD screen. Also, this is a chance to build a specific architecture on which to hang the works, and to incorporate a number of architectural elements: walls, wallpaper, tapestries, to create a fluid environment where the paintings merge with the architecture,” says the artist.

The exhibition has been curated by Noelle Collins, Exhibitions and Offsite Curator, Towner Eastbourne.

Melissa Gordon (1981, Cambridge, USA, British and American) has exhibited widely across the UK, Europe and the US. Solo exhibitions include 'Routine Pleasures' at the Vleeshal (2016), Middleburg, 'Fallible Space', The Bluecoat, Liverpool (2016), ‘Material Evidence’, Spike Island (2013), ’Shits and Giggles’, Deweer Gallery (2019), 'Female Readymades', Cosar HMT, Dusseldorf (2020), and 'Modelling a Painting: an accumulation of information on liquids and gestures in time', Manifold Books, Amsterdam (2020). She has also exhibited at Museum Dhont Dhaenens, Belgium, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, GARAGE, Rotterdam, WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Stedelik Museum, Amsterdam, MMKA, Arnhem, and Kunsthall Oslo and has done projects with Artists Space, New York, South London Gallery, and Kunstinstituut Melly (FKA Witte de With), Rotterdam. Notably she curated the exhibition ’The Mechanics of Fluids’ on liquidity in female art at Marianne Boesky Gallery (2018). She has held residencies at Cove Park, Spike Island and Wiels.

Melissa Gordon attended De Ateliers in Amsterdam in 2003-5 and she is currently Professor of Painting at Oslo Art Academy. Her catalogue ‘Painting Behind Itself’ was published by Revolver Press in 2017. Her recent essay “The Bodily Site of Painting'' has been published in the book “Funny Peculiar” by Slimovolume Press (2020). Concurrent exhibitions will be held at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium and Galerie Stigter van Doesburg in Amsterdam in Autumn 2021.