Biography
Born in New York City in 1951, Merrill Steiger showed an early affinity for art that was stimulated when at the age of seven she was enrolled by her mother in a private art class. For the next eight years she received training in a wide variety of mediums, including painting in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, drawing, printmaking, and collage. Steiger attended the High School of Music and Art, developing her interest in “color fragmentation”, juxtaposing strong colors using hard-edged shapes, an approach that would later inform her mature work.
Steiger went on to study art at Lehman College, receiving her BFA in Painting in 1973. While studying in college, her interest was in representational images, especially portraits and landscapes, interpreted abstractly. Following three year throwing and glazing pots in the mid-1970s, Steiger began painting abstract architectural images that reflected a trip she had taken to Mexico. This experience of connecting with the art of an ancient culture, and incorporating it into her own art, has become a recurring theme in Steiger’s work. She has made a practice of visiting spiritual Power Spots, geographic sites charged with positive energy. Her travels and studies have brought her in contact with the art of Aboriginal Australians, and the indigenous traditions of Africa and Asia, including Japan, where she lived for three years in the early 1980s. For ten years following her return to New York, Steiger produced collages, at first strongly influenced by origami, the art of paper folding, and by the paper and restrained palette of Japan. The collages that followed featured the combining of vividly colored images
In the early 1990s, Steiger returned to painting with a series of abstracted nudes. This work was influenced by her personal interest in body building, and reflects the intimate bond between the artist’s life experiences and her art. Steiger has long felt the connection between her spiritual path, including meditation and exercise, and her work as an artist. In 1999, an extended art meditation directed by a teacher of the Kabbalah opened up an new dimension in her work. The intuitive transformation that she experienced lead directly to the Zen/Dot/Energy Series that she began in 2000. This group of paintings uses dots in conjunction with circles and chakras, drawn from the Indian tantric tradition.
In 2004, Steiger began the ongoing series, Unseen Universe, which features organic forms, landscape imagery, and startling shifts of scale from the microscopic to the cosmic. The strongly-hued paintings suggest a journey through the inner space of one’s own consciousness.
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