Vital Signs: Gesture and Feminism
Melissa Gordon will give a talk on the role of gesture in her painting practice, as well as notions of liquidity. She will discuss topics raised in her recent book Vital Signs, and speak about recent exhibitions and her twenty year artistic practice as a developing investigation of gesture and feminism.
Melissa Gordon is an American and British artist, writer and publisher based in Brussels. Gordon’s work as a painter utilises a number of tools: painterly qualities, silkscreen, text, cuts and collage to arrange surfaces that investigate the material histories of painting. In her ongoing series "Female Readymades", she bring a hanging device onto the surface of the paintings, and flattens the reality between abstraction and evidence. Her work as a painter, feminist organiser and writer has been running parallel and in dialogue for over ten years. Her writing investigates questions of gender and liqudity often in relationship to authorship and painterly histories.
Gordon graduated from De Ateliers in 2003, and has since exhibited at Kunsthall Oslo, (2023) CON10UR Biennial, Mechelen (2023), Liquid Gestures, and Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2021-2), amongst others. She is the Professor of Painting at Oslo Art Academy and also has an extensive publishing history.