Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting (non-objective)
Website: melprest.com
Mel Prest was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and lives and works in San Francisco, California. She is a non-objective painter whose work is focused on color and perceptual visual relationships, and is represented by K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco. Her paintings have been acquired by the Schneider Museum of Art, BAMPFA, and Google, as well as corporate and private collections. As an independent curator, she has organized exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, and Zagreb. She is a founding member of Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial gallery initiative in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She has taught and lectured at California College of the Arts, the Graduate Center at CCNY, UCLA, Mills College, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Prest makes paintings that explore the perceptual and optical dimensions of color — how colors behave in proximity to one another, how the eye is compelled and destabilized, how simultaneous contrast can produce the sensation of movement across a static surface. Her lines are executed freehand with deliberate care, creating geometric structures that carry the warmth of the hand even as they approach the rigor of pure abstraction. She approaches color as a system and as an experience, drawing on traditions from Josef Albers to Bay Area abstraction, while maintaining a sensory directness that keeps the work from feeling academic.
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