Berry Campbell is pleased to announce a landmark retrospective of paintings and works on paper by Mercedes Matter (1913-2001). A painter, educator, and a key figure in Abstract Expressionism, Matter is best known for founding the New York Studio School in 1964, following the publication of her influential essay, “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools?” in ARTnews.
The exhibition presents works spanning Matter’s career, from early figurative drawings in Hofmann’s classroom to dynamic large-scale canvases and incisive late charcoals. Together, they reveal an artist of deep formal command and emotional range, one whose legacy lies not only in her art, but in her transformative role as founder of the New York Studio School. As Christina Kee says at the end of her essay for the exhibition: “Her works are an offering of a hard-won painter’s space – a place for giving as she was given to.”
The exhibition opens September 5, 2025, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm, and remains on view through October 4, 2025.
Matter occupies an extraordinary place in postwar American art. As a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936, she was among the earliest champions of abstraction in the United States, working to further understanding of abstract art in an American art world still resistant to this concept. In the 1940s and ’50s, Matter was at the heart of the New York School, one of only three female voting members of “The Club.” As a close friend of Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock, she was a peer whose intellect, charisma, and formidable painting practice earned her equal footing in a movement often dominated by men. She helped shape the conversations around Abstract Expressionism, while producing paintings and drawings of exceptional rigor and vitality.
Her work, which straddles the line between representation and abstraction, reflects a lifelong investigation into the “picture plane,” the dynamic space where surface meets depth. Abstracted still lifes, landscapes, and figure compositions vibrate with her bold brushstrokes, saturated color, and structural intelligence. She absorbed the lessons of her father, modernist painter Arthur Beecher Carles, and her mentor Hans Hofmann, but forged her own path, one that embraced both the intensity of perception and the freedom of abstract form.
The exhibition presents works spanning Matter’s career, from early figurative drawings in Hofmann’s classroom to dynamic large-scale canvases and incisive late charcoals. Together, they reveal an artist of deep formal command and emotional range, one whose legacy lies not only in her art, but in her transformative role as founder of the New York Studio School. As Christina Kee says at the end of her essay for the exhibition: “Her works are an offering of a hard-won painter’s space – a place for giving as she was given to.”
This exhibition marks Matter’s first major solo exhibition in New York since her traveling retrospective which opened at Miskin Gallery, Baruch College (CUNY) that opened in 2009. In conjunction with the exhibition, Berry Campbell will publish a fully illustrated 40-page exhibition catalogue featuring an essay by Christina Kee.
