Douglas Melini takes a radical alternative to the blank canvas, making works that are part painting, part sculpture, and part something else altogether. The linen, oil, and acrylic-stained reclaimed wood creations shatter the hierarchy of artwork and its frame; the wood elements of Melini’s paintings are not merely supplementary, but rather integral to the composition itself.

Get up close, and Melini’s patient labor and intimate understanding of his materials are revealed. As Raphael Rubenstein observes in the catalogue essay, “If you were to disentangle and stretch out the strings of paint on the linen squares, they could conceivably be used to fill in the countless thin channels and furrows that scar the surfaces of the wood panels; the countless paint strings in the center are the positive correlative to the negative fissures in the wood.” Reframing natural elements of the landscape and bringing them into the gallery space, Melini’s work successfully blurs the boundaries between art and the context in which it appears.

Douglas Melini (b. 1972) received his Bachelor of Arts from Maryland, College Park in 1994 and his Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts in 1997. He completed an artist residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Brooklyn, NY in 2012.

Melini’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Phillip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO; 11R, New York, NY; Eleven Rivington, New York, NY; Feature Inc., New York, NY; MINUS SPACE, New York, NY; Ursula Werz, Tubingen, Germany; Rocket Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and White Columns, New York, NY.