MICHAEL VOSS | Door to the Garden | MELANIE’S OFFICE
April 13 - May 16, 2025
During the time that turned out to be the final months of my mother’s life, I began making works with oil stick or oil pastel on paper.
It was as if the circumstances demanded a change in my working methods.
Sure, I had used oil stick on paper before, making drawings from nature, mainly outdoors: Lots of drawings of fig leaves or of the feral cats that live in our backyard. But these new works are something all together different.
I approached them not so much as drawing, but as a continuation of my work in painting, alas in a different medium, and therefore altered methodology.
As with my painting, what I basically do is develop shapes until they make sense to me. The goal is to achieve clarity, not so much in the sense of purity or simplicity, but in the sense that a form has clearly reached a viable state of independence from my initial intensions, and goes beyond my limited imagination.
Michael Voss, born in São Paulo, Brazil, lives in Ridgewood, Queens. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, and at Hunter College, NYC. His work is in various collections, among them the Bavarian State Chancellery, the BMW Collection, Munich, Alcoa in the Lever House in NYC, and the collections of Ronald S. Lauder and Estée Lauder.
He is represented by Galerie Wittenbrink in Munich, where he last was in a two person show with David Rabinowitch in 2020. Ten of his “Tantric Floaters” paintings are concurrently on view at the Hearst Tower, NYC, as part of “2025 Art Now”.
AL’S OFFICE
MICHAEL VOSS - Floaters
On View: April 28 - June 3, 2022
View Exhibition
Michael Voss paintings contemplate subtle but decisive differences: thresholds, tipping points. When does mark become shape? How does shape turn to image? Nearly the same yet actually something else altogether.
Although the conditions are fluid, its parts are clear - never vague or blurred. The situation calls for a pragmatic approach how to make sense of what we see.
A painting is like a stranger in the room.
Floaters is a group of black on white, individual canvases of identical dimensions, approximately the size of a paperback. The category has been started in 2020, and is ongoing. There are at the moment about 70 works.
from Psychology Wiki: “The perception of floaters is known as myodesopsia, or less commonly as myiodeopsia, myiodesopsia, or myodeopsia.” [1]
Born in São Paulo, Brazil
Studied at the Akademie Der Bildenden Künste, Munich, and at Hunter College, NY (MFA)
Michael lives and works in Ridgewood, NY.
He has shown in Europe and North America.
His last show was, together with David Rabinowitch at Galerie Wittenbrink, Munich in 2020.
MICHAEL VOSS | Paintings with Names and Related Drawings
April 28 - June 9, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, April 28th, 6-9pm
In the Main Gallery, Michael Voss will present a series of abstract paintings on linen and a selection of recent drawings. Voss’s small-scale canvases embody a subtly-shifting boundary between deceptive simplicity and stealth complexity. They are composed of color gestures that are as strikingly intimate as they are vastly open-ended. Voss does not just title his paintings, he names them; Jacqueline, Ana Garcia, Fuentes. By intuitively naming each canvas upon its completion, Voss ties his work to the notion that a name is at once an abstract and general term while also personifying a specific individual.
Michael Voss received his MFA from Hunter College. His work has been shown in gallery & museum exhibitions throughout the US and internationally, including George Lawson Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Parallel Art Space (Brooklyn, NY), Riverside Art Museum (Riverside, CA), Raum X (London) and ABContemporary (Switzerland). Voss’s work is in the permanent collections of Bayerische Staatskanzlei, Munich; BMW AG, Munich; and Alcoa, Lever House, New York. In November 2017 Voss will have a solo exhibition at Galerie Wittenbrink in Germany.