Jackie Meier

New Collectors is pleased to present Correspondence, Jackie Meier’s debut solo show with the gallery. The exhibition features oil on canvas paintings that showcase her newest series of work, developed over the past two years. In this series, Meier finds harmony between organic and geometric shapes with layered and expansive vignettes of color and intuitive brushstrokes that mirror her lived environment.

For Jackie Meier, the balance between geometric and organic, hard and soft, industrial and natural, is omnipresent and necessary. For years Meier painted geometric compositions and while it was essential for her practice, it wasn’t her desired end point. In exploring brushstrokes, she began to develop a more intuitive way of painting—applying the paint to the canvas, scraping it off, adding more layers and continuing this process until she achieves a composition that satisfies the right balance of structure and intuition.

Located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Meier’s studio faces an industrial dry dock and has a backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. This setting provides constant inspiration for Meier: the curvature of the ships, the verticality of the skyscrapers, the muted colors in the Navy Yard, the chains and ropes that slope when hanging from equipment. It’s a perfect example of how Meier abstracts shapes and colors from our natural and built environments. In her own words, she’s trying to integrate geometry with the organic world, rather than let one dominate the other.

In Take Off, we can see how layers of varying opacity combine to push parts of the painting forward and back, as if different depths coexist on a single canvas. The vertical and horizontal lines break the painting up into different spaces and planes, giving it lively dimension. Throughout this presentation, Meier pushes the boundaries of space in her canvas, a departure from earlier works that revolve around single focal points. In her newest work we see that focal point multiply and spread to the borders of the canvas, demonstrating the ever expanding potential of paint on canvas.

Jackie Meier received her BA for Economics at Boston College in 1988 and after beginning painting in 2000 at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, she went on to pursue her MFA at Pratt where she graduated in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include Nancy Margolis Gallery, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, and Janet Kurnatowski Gallery. In 2020 and 2022, she attended a residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Meier was co-chair of the Village Of Mamaroneck’s Arts Council From 2017-2021. In 2020, Meier created a mural in Building 77 of the Brooklyn Navy Yard where she also has her studio. Meier currently lives in Westchester, NY and works in Brooklyn, NY.