John Meyer

For exhibition 47 we are honored to be presenting a particularly important installation, a collection of thirteen of the diptychs of the late San Francisco-based painter John Meyer (1943-2002). Meyer was closely associated with the Radical, or Fundamental, Painting movement in the 1980's and 1990's. In his late phase he explored deep-historical techniques and materials: traditionally cradled hardwood panels and Renaissance pigments such as arsenic, lapis lazuli and coral, painted in egg and casein tempera. His preferred motif was a pair of square or slightly off-square monochrome panels hung an inch apart in diptych. His work has been exhibited and is in the permanent collection of the Albright Knox Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Stiftung Für Konkrete Kunst in Reutlingen, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This is the first major exhibition of Meyer’s work since the artist’s death and many of these paintings have been in storage in America and Switzerland, and have not been seen in fourteen years. Several are loaned from private collections. Accompanying the exhibition is an 108 page full-color catalog with archival text by the late SFMOMA curator John Caldwell, New York critic Lilly Wei, German scholars Erich Franz, Gabriele Kübler and Georg Imdahl, and San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker, along with commentary by George Lawson and statements by the artist. A reception at the gallery honoring John Meyer and opening the run of the exhibition will be held Thursday, May 7th, from 4:00 to 7:00 PM.