Professor Clayton Merrell‘s solo exhibition “Ecstatic Landscapes” will be on view at Concept Art Gallery in Pittsburgh June 25 through July 30.
The exhibition features three galleries of work centered around an ongoing series of delicate landscape etchings that have been altered, effaced, and obliterated by overpainting. Through that process, each one is changed into something new and more dynamic, while still carrying an echo of the original that was lost. Those prints serve as the starting point for a series of paintings that use some of the same strategies — landscapes that are subjected to destructive and transformative forces resulting in images that are familiar but unsettled, placid and ecstatic.