Drew Merritt

Los Angeles based Drew Merritt has resolved to defy categorization. Merritt's vision of painting the human spirit with an urban mindset has allowed him to paint a broad spectrum of human capacity and the depravity of our shared situation in the twenty-first century. Whitewashed canvases mark his departure from a purely transitive style to a matured, complex, and iconographically jarring body of work. Treating each canvas as a borderland where hybridized forms and beings meet, Merritt throws light on members of marginal communities, unsung heroes, villains, friends and foes. Christianizing culturally ambiguous and sexually androgynous figures, his painted Others are icons of urban culture, contextualized by the ubiquitous grit of metropolitan dwelling. The starkness of his backgrounds are laden with faded visual memories, not only of his own style, but of the cities we find ourselves in today. His figures temporally and spatially timeless, inhabitants of a placeless place.