Linn Meyers

[1][2] She is known for dense, intricate drawings, paintings, installations and prints that range in scale from page-sized images to large pieces on Mylar and panel to monumental, site-specific wall works.

[20][22][23] In her early career, Meyers largely focused on landscape-based paintings that moved from ambiguously referential studies in tone and atmosphere to more abstract pieces in which loosely gridded brushstrokes created elusive, pulsing spaces.

[29] Meyers's creative process relies equally on a meticulous, rigorous focus and an intuitive approach open to tiny slippages and imperfections of the human hand that take her compositions in unforeseen directions.

Working without templates or tape, she then laid down successive strokes of acrylic ink, paint, pen or marker following the contours of the prior mark as if drafting a topographical chart.

[5][21][3] Each mark was a direct response building on the last, forming densely packed patterns in which inadvertent skips, bends and variations accumulate like the ripples of pebbles in a pond or ancient tree cross-sections.

"[9] Some observers link Meyers's approach to Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt in its attention to systematic structure and formal considerations, or to Vija Celmins due to its suggestions of natural phenomena.

[29][32] Artforum's Nord Wennerstrom wrote, "time is suspended, and the effect is meditative, blissful, and refreshing";[29] the Baltimore Sun deemed them "labor-intensive abstract mandalas … [with] a heroic ambition to limn the infinite through mark-making at the limits of perception.

[35][36][37][38] The Phillips Collection commissioned a wall drawing in response to one of its van Gogh paintings: at the time being (2010), whose dense web of lines suggested immersion in the brushstrokes of the Dutch artist.

[2] Inspired by the color and light of Los Angeles, the deep-violet and pale-yellow, roughly 100-foot-long work featured rolling swirls, curves and teardrop shapes made of multiple strokes, which appeared to tumble toward the bottom of the museum's lobby staircase.

[9][39] In 2016, Meyers created Our View From Here (2016), a 400-foot-long drawing executed over 11 weeks that snaked through the Hirshhorn Museum's curving, circular second floor gallery; the title referenced the inability to see the work in its entirety.

"[40][4] Let's Get Lost (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2018) was a wall drawing whose physical parameters determined the content of an invisible, participatory sound work, Listening Glass (created by Rebecca Bray, James Bigbee Garver and Josh Knowles).

Linn Meyers, Every now. And again , ink on wall, 2011. Hammer Museum.
Linn Meyers, Untitled , acrylic ink on panel, 78" x 66", 2019. Collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Linn Meyers, Untitled , ink and acrylic gouache on vintage graph paper, 10.5" x 8", 2023.