Jun 08, 2023 - Sale 2640

Sale 2640 - Lot 142

Price Realized: $ 6,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
TAMARA MELCHER
Untitled.

Acrylic on canvas, 1965. 940x930 mm; 36 3/4x36 3/4 inches. Signed and dated "Oct 65" in oil, verso.

Provenance: Gifted by the artist, New York, to Norman Dolph, New York; thence by descent to the current owner.

Throughout her career, Melcher has experimented with different media, including printmaking, clothing and fabric design, and photography. During the 1960s, she was working on a series of geometric paintings on polygonal canvases. She was the only female artist among the original artist-members of the collective Park Place Gallery, New York. In 1964-65, Melcher began using Pantine colored paper to create hard-edged geometric collages, and these experiments evolved into her paintings which played with ambiguity and spatial effects. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, in Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York, wrote of Melcher's works, "The geometric elements . . . cling to the surface of her canvas, organized as they are by a uniform underlying checkerboard . . . just one of the many alternative geometrical substructures suggested by the diagonal edges of triangles and other forms."