NEW YORK, NY.- Douglas Melini takes a radical alternative to the blank canvas, making works that are part painting, part sculpture, and part something else altogether. The linen, oil, and acrylic-stained reclaimed wood creations shatter the hierarchy of artwork and its frame; the wood elements of Melini’s paintings are not merely supplementary, but rather integral to the composition itself.
Get up close, and Melini’s patient labor and intimate understanding of his materials are revealed. As Raphael Rubenstein observes in the catalogue essay, “If you were to disentangle and stretch out the strings of paint on the linen squares, they could conceivably be used to fill in the countless thin channels and furrows that scar the surfaces of the wood panels; the countless paint strings in the center are the positive correlative to the negative fissures in the wood.” Reframing natural elements of the landscape and bringing them into the gallery space, Melini’s work successfully blurs the boundaries between art and the context in which it appears.
Douglas Melini (b. 1972) received his Bachelor of Arts from Maryland, College Park in 1994 and his Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts in 1997. He completed an artist residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Brooklyn, NY in 2012.
Melini’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Phillip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO; 11R, New York, NY; Eleven Rivington, New York, NY; Feature Inc., New York, NY; MINUS SPACE, New York, NY; Ursula Werz, Tubingen, Germany; Rocket Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and White Columns, New York, NY.
His work has been included in institutional group exhibitions at Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; Ikast Kunstpakhuset, Ikast, Denmark; International Print Center, New York, NY; Kunsthalle del Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca, Spain; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; RaygunLab, Toowoomba, Australia; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY, and elsewhere.
He is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Fellowship in Painting, Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio Residency and Change Inc. Grant. His work is included in the permanent collections of Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, Germany; Jill and Peter Kraus Collection, Dutchess County, NY; Neuberger Berman LLC, New York, NY; The Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, OH; Wellspring Capital Corporation, New York, NY; and Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York.
Melini lives and works in New Jersey.
