Melissa Kretschmer born in 1962, Santa Monica (California). She lives and works in New York.

Melissa Kretschmer’s paintings exist at the crossroads of the sculptural and the painterly, where the interaction of the works elements enables them to exist both on a plane and in a space all at once. They are as much about the inside as they are about the surface and support. With a wide variety of materials, Kretschmer’s work reconfigures the defined borders of painting.

Her “excavations” or progressive exposures of underlays of the work’s plywood substrate, combined with interventions of colour and texture, seem to expose depths well beneath the surface of the wall behind them. These works exist somewhere between painting and sculpture, where aspects of each revealed to be inextricably linked: flatness and depth, colour and matter, transparency, translucency and opacity, light and shadow. Taking as her palette plywood, vellum, gesso, gouache, beeswax and graphite, she introduces sawing and cutting as a means of drawing and sculpting. Beginning with common plywood the artist builds various layers with overlapping sheets of vellum washed with milky gesso in order to obtain a delicate and translucent surface. Melissa Kretschmer never feels fully satisfied or convinced by the simple dichotomy of “surface and support”. She always felt the presence of something more, that the experience was potentially more complicated and full than that. There is a literal and physical depth in painting, which inevitably enriches and accentuates the perceived depth. “What happens on the surface begins deep within.”