Simone Meltesen

Simone Meltesen is an artist based in New York.  She was born and raised in San Francisco, CA, and has lived and worked in NYC for over a decade. She recently graduated with an MFA in Painting from Hunter College in New York City.

My paintings are explorations of lesbian feminist formalism. Rooted in the modernist weaving designs of the Bauhaus and the 1970s feminist reclamation of domestic patterning, my colorful, seductive, subtle, complex paintings challenge the traditional patriarchal boundaries of what kind of marks, colors, concepts, and subject positions are allowed access to a “high art” context. Devices such as empty horizons, blank canvas, erasures and extractions create a sense of loss or absence, and centralize the marginalized experience of the lesbian subject that is often theorized as ghostly or apparitional.

These are lesbian feminist paintings that insist on a both/and reading, positioning the viewer as lesbian and inserting lesbian desire into abstraction.

CV