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News & ArtsThursday, July 23, 2009
Visual Art Currently Hanging
Posted by Jen Graves on Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 3:35 PM
What you're used to seeing from Merrill Wagner are super-minimalist steel rectangles like these (this one's from 2004 and called Perspective):
Below is what she's doing now, at age 72—still working with painted found steel, but with smaller and brighter parts connected by heavy-duty magnets. This one, my favorite of the current show at William Traver Gallery downtown, is called Yellow Beans, from 2008, and is 12 feet tall and 5 1/2 feet wide.
Wagner lives partly in Tacoma and partly in New York. She's been an established artist for decades, but her husband is the art-history-book-and-play-inspiring-famous one. He's Robert Ryman, of the all-whiteness.
Their son, Cordy Ryman, is also an artist who makes total environments based in painting. Each one, in addition to its other layers, is like a family in-joke.
Their other son, Will Ryman, was a playwright until he started making sculptures out of his characters instead.
Their brother Ethan (son of Lucy Lippard)? Musician.
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