Opening September 19, the exhibition features new paintings in the balance between beauty and destruction.
Professor Clayton Merrell’s latest body of work, coming to Pittsburgh’s Concept Gallery in a new solo exhibition “Heat Index,” seeks a peculiar balance: images that can be simultaneously comforting and disquieting, familiar and disorienting, beautiful and bewildering.
“When I am at work in the studio, I am often trying to do two things at once: to make lushly beautiful landscape images that reach toward the solace, scope, and perspective that the natural world can provide, and to represent the destructive changes that we are rapidly unleashing on that world,” Merrell says. “I want to make a painting that conveys how beautiful our world is. I want to make a painting that conveys how broken our world is. I want them to be the same painting.”
Concept Art Gallery will host an opening reception on Saturday, September 19, from 1-4pm. “Heat Index” remains on view through October 31, 2026.
Left: Temperature Cycle, oil on canvas, 2026, 40×30. Right: Cooling Cycle, oil on canvas, 2026, 48×36