303 Gallery is pleased to present What does the dog say?, an exhibition of new paintings by Tanya Merrill in the gallery’s Project Room.
Tanya Merrill’s work invents narratives to examine humanity’s fraught relationship to nature and cultural portrayals of gender and sexuality through her own contemporary lens. Fantastic, consequential, and at times humorous scenes are populated by animals and characters caught amidst moments of introspection, fervor, or mischief. Gesture and movement are punctuated by sketched lines, lending her canvases a sense of effervescence and immediacy. Reinterpreting motifs drawn from throughout art history, Merrill imbues a sense of familiarity to her storytelling as a means to decode 21st century concerns. Symbols and imagery make repeat appearances from one work to the next, building a mythology of personas and environments.
Three of the canvases are imagined scenes, each pair alludes to both real figures in Merrill’s life and referenced personas from literature and art history. Throughout time, depictions of woman and dog have evolved from status symbols to more intimate representations. Here, both woman and dog are contemplative and dreamy, they are thinking and sitting together, each with an inner life of equal measure.
Minimal in palette, the primary colors of red, blue and yellow, harken back to the simplicity of the book that first posed the question, “What does the dog say?.” A rendering of the piece of paper that Merrill hung in her studio is the first canvas in the show and its namesake.
Tanya Merrill was born in New York City in 1987. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Columbia University. Recent exhibitions include a solo presentation at the Museum of Natural History Basel for Art Parcours in 2023, and solo exhibition at The Pond Society, Shanghai in 2021.
