Melissa Gordon

with works by Chris Evans

In her first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Melissa Gordon presents a new series of paintings titled The View from Inside – an expansive visual inquiry into the unseen, remembered, and projected spaces where women make art. Built from shared conversations, studio visits (both virtual and real), and an ongoing commitment to mapping the invisible lines between contemporary female artists, the series is at once a tribute, a proposition, and a refusal. For the exhibition Gordon has invited the artist Chris Evans to present two sculptural works titled Goofy Audit, doubling an emphasis on the gestures of imprint and spilling within the exhibition.

At the center of each of Gordon’s paintings is the window—not merely as a motif, but as a formal and conceptual device. For Gordon, windows mark thresholds between painterly flatness and physical architecture, between absence and presence, between the self and the other. This exhibition, like the series itself, operates as a rhizomatic gathering: a network of artists, friends, and collaborators whose studio spaces form the origin point for each painting. Whether photographed firsthand or sent remotely, these windows become points of departure for abstraction—collaged, printed, painted, and layered with urgency and care.

Gordon is known for a practice that moves across media—screen printing, frottage, digital collage, painting—and yet resists stylistic fixity. Her surfaces are built from both technical skill and deliberate imperfection. In What is Left, large-scale canvases are cut to the width of her Epson printer, hand-collaged, and left visibly constructed, exposing the limits of the process and the tactile labor embedded within. The printed image is never simply documentation—it is fractured, flattened, and reassembled into a painterly form that carries the residue of another place, another person. It is not portraiture. It is not homage. It is a feminist gesture: one of acknowledgment, visibility, and speculative care.

These paintings are marked by absence. The bodies of the artists whose studios are depicted are never present—but their ways of seeing, their contexts, their modes of making remain palpable. 

“I am not motivated to paint objects that are recognizable as such. Doing so belies an action whose aim is to occupy short spans of attention, like advertising. Instead, my reason for speaking in the medium of painting is precisely because it occupies time in a weirder, less linear way. Or rather: what is unknown, un-recognizable, in that it looms spectre-like beyond our field of vision or floats to the top, like minerals in water. Call that magical practices, science fiction, modeling, fortune-telling, etc.”

Gordon’s work resists direct representation. Instead, it builds a painterly language that is purposefully open-ended, unrecognizable in the conventional sense, and temporally unsettled. In What is Left, abstraction becomes a form of modeling, of fortune-telling—gesturing toward an uncertain future that is political, ecological, and personal. “I am looking from inside out of their spaces, through an other’s eyes, aware of forgotten genealogies and aware of codifying new ones”

The series emerged in the shadow of global shifts: war, climate disaster, displacement. In an earlier series of ‘The View from Inside’, Gordon reflects on artists in Paris who built utopian modernist studios only to flee them a decade later. The question of what comes in from the outside—what forces move us from the spaces we build—hovers throughout the exhibition. So they have, as all of Gordon’s works do, a political question at their core.

The paintings resist illusionism even as they evoke it. Photographs are manipulated—flattened, rasterized, stripped of excess detail—until they resemble screen prints, though no screen was used. This visual sleight of hand underscores Gordon’s deep engagement with the histories of both printmaking and feminist abstraction. The reference is not incidental: artists such as Mary Heilmann, Lee Krasner, Amy Sillman, and Jacqueline Humphries—Gordon’s former teacher—form part of a lineage in which collage, repetition, and process are mobilized as both aesthetic and political tools.

These are not windows into representation. They are apertures that strain to hold the energy of painterly transformation—thresholds between interior worlds and the forces pressing in from without. Layers of translucent blues, violets, greys, and sharp ochres accumulate across the surface, at times vibrant, at times muddied. The result is neither sleek nor seamless. Instead, it is resolutely constructed—tactile, imperfect, and insistently material.

Accompanying the paintings from the series The View from Inside are a number of monotypes: works produced as attempts at an ephemeral space with forms emerging from the surfaces. Downstairs, drawings titled Idioms which portray a visualization of sayings such as ‘Seriously?’ falling like a gymnasts ribbon onto the ground, add a vocal element.

Ultimately, What is Left is not a view but a passage. Each work acts as a portal—echoing the long history of the window in painting from Caspar David Friedrich to Jo Baer—not to a picturesque beyond, but to the strange and unspoken forces that shape our worlds. Gordon’s painting is a form of time travel: rooted in pigment and surface, reaching into speculative futures, and grounding itself in the interstitial space between artists, between artworks, between now and what comes next.

Melissa Gordon is an American artist based in Brussels. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union and completed residencies at De Ateliers (Amsterdam) and WIELS (Brussels). She has exhibited internationally with solo shows at Vital Signs,Kunsthall Oslo (2023), Periphery, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2024),  Liquid Gestures, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK (2021-2), Manifold Books, Amsterdam (2020), and Derivative Value, Kunstverein Luebeck, DE, Routine Pleasures, Vleeshal, Middleburg, NL (2016), Material Evidence, Spike Island, Bristol, UK; as well as group exhibition participations: Painting after Painting, SMAK, Ghent (2025), In Anderen Handen, Miettinen Collection, Berlin, BE (2025), WE. The Body as Sign, Muelheim Ruhr Museum, DE  (2025), CONT0UR Biennial, Mechelen (2023), 10 Women, MuHKA, Antwerp (2023), Cubitt Gallery (2022),  Binnenkamers: Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, BE (2020), Heavy Metal Parking Lot, GARAGE, Rotterdam (2020), Something Stronger Than Me, WIELS, Brussels, BE (2018).

Her recent book of works and collected writings titled “Vital Signs: Writings on Gesture” was published by Occasional Papers and Frans Masereel Centrum in 2024. It follows two monographs: Material Evidence with Sternberg Press in 2013 and Painting Behind Itself in 2016.

Chris Evans is an English artist, based in Brussels, who has been making exhibitions in museums, biennials, galleries and art centres worldwide since the early 2000’s. His work combines mediums of sculpture, sound, performative events and airbrush painting. 

What is Left, includes two new relief sculptures by Chris Evans. They are additions to a series, titled Goofy Audit, first commissioned by the 11th Liverpool Biennial and shown extensively since then. Inscribed relief tablets depict two figures: an ‘i’ and a ‘paw-i’.  Either one may stand consistently in the focal centre and each tablet’s composition is a permutation of the possible placement of the other in the tablet’s pictorial field as seen in perspective and viewed from above. In the new series, the tablets are produced in a vividly coloured jesmonite, swept using a moulding of marks left by the hard bristles of a broom and cast with shallow pools in which a dark resin is poured. The figures of ‘i’ and a ‘paw-i’, always in relationship to one another, become part of a topography of suspended movements that render a sense of what is left.

Evans’ work often evolves through conversation with people from diverse walks of life, selected in relation to their public life or symbolic role. Works become indexes of a larger structure through which Evans deliberately confuses the roles of artist and patron, author and muse. He is currently completing a long term public commission in rural Estonia, that began by interviewing managing directors of global corporations, from five diverse sectors of commerce, on their understanding of loyalty and how that could be made manifest in physical form. Initiated on the eve of Estonia’s accession to the European Union the work with open in 2026. 

Chris Evans’s solo presentations include the commissions by many international institutions including Parasite, Hong Kong; Praxis, Berlin; Project Arts, Dublin; Stedelijk Bureau, Amsterdam; Studio Voltaire, London, and The British School in Rome. He has also exhibited in several  international art biennials:  Athens Biennial 1; 4th International Architecture Biennale, Rotterdam; Taipei Biennial 10; Berlin Biennial 8 and the 11th Liverpool Biennial. A monograph, Goofy Audit, was published by Sternberg Press and his work has been featured in several compendiums on sculpture including Contemporary Sculpture—Artists’s Writings and Interviews (Hatje Cantz, 2020) and Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (Phaidon). Chris Evans has also edited and illustrated anthologies of writing including: Job Interviews (Parasite, Hong Kong, 2019) and Magnetic Promenade (Studio Voltaire, 2006). 

Initiated by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth (a collaboration between the artist, Graham Kelly and Morten Norbye Halvorsen) records and performs music with artists who use spoken word as a medium. At the gallery, on the 14th of June, Sudden Wealth will perform Noelle Kocot’s Under Gemini, read by Jason Dodge.

Sudden Wealth will perform at Gallery Barbara Seiler June 14th, at 17:00 during the Zurich Art Weekend.