Drew Merritt | The Overture
Known for his dramatically staged and hyper-realistically rendered figurative works, Los Angeles-based painter Drew Merritt is interested in exploring the shifting expressive tensions of the human figure. With the exaggerated impact of stark visual contrasts, Merritt pushes his works into the realm of fantasy with heightened extremes, costuming, and mise-en-scène. Something visceral and uncomfortable prevails in Merritt’s highly stylized works, in their complete reduction of context to uneasily arrant white backgrounds, and in their Baroque preference for the theatricality of effect.