NEW CANAAN, CONN.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art is presenting “Melissa Meyer: Hitting the Right Notes,” her first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view through June 23rd.

Meyer’s abstract paintings have a signature calligraphy and rhythmic curvilinear vernacular that are more complex than they initially seem. Like a good bottle of wine, her works open up when allowed to breathe and the more one looks, the more notes are savored. Her lengthy career stands as a testament to her authenticity, with forty-plus solo exhibitions, commissions, teaching and artist-in-residence positions here and abroad.

Meyer primes her canvases with gesso, sanding them to get smooth, paper-like surfaces, then applies a patchwork of grounds in soft tones and varying whites, or bright contrasting colors. Diluting her oil pigments to achieve a watercolor or ink-like viscosity, she uses long-handled brushes and works with the canvas or paper on the floor, walking around as she paints to avoid drips. Her intuitive sense of color distinguishes itself with a compositional arrangement where the grounds play equal protagonists to the overlaying brush strokes – fluid marks negotiate and navigate their way across the grounds upon which they rest. Her glyphs may seem ordered, even alphabet-like, but they resist deciphering and motion the viewer’s eye to roam freely about the work. Unexpected relationships between the framed grounds, juxtaposed colors and overlapping gestures reveal that not one color, nor one aspect of the composition dominates over the other. Taken as a whole, each painting has its own palette system and character. Meyer has been extensively written about and has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo and Shanghai. Her works are in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. She is also a Rome Prize winner and a grant recipient from the National Endowment of the Arts Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation. Last year, she installed a fourteen-foot mural in the new U.S. Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgysztan.