Sam Messer
Evolution of Desire 2007
Etching
Value: $700

Novelist Paul Auster has said that if he could paint, “these are the pictures I would dream of doing.” Sam Messer’s lush, character-driven portraits of everyday subject matter—people, typewriters, trees, animals, buildings, furniture—can be deceptively light in tone. Their bold, playful surfaces reveal the process of painting but also the attitude of the painter, which Ben Harman notes “at times is confident, at times silly, and occasionally even severe and concerned.” Coming out of ‘80s neo-expressionism, Messer turned away from allegory and portentousness and toward compositions with a magical psychology that, through vibrant coloration and intuitive brushwork, are immediate and deeply affecting. As art critic Donald Kuspit writes: “One can say that Messer revitalizes our sense of the power of the unconsciousness by making the picture borderline—hallucinatory—through his use of the ‘fantastic’ gesture.”

Messer studied at the Cooper Union and received an MFA from Yale University School of Art. He has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and has exhibited his work at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Sculpture Center in New York, and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, among others. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts; Paine Webber, New York; Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  He is the associate dean at the Yale School of Art.