The works of Melissa Kretschmer (born Santa Monica, California, 1962; lives in New York City; works in Long Island City, New York) derive their puissance from a symbiotic relationship between sculpture and painting. The oeuvre she has built over the past quarter-century has been featured in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, the Miami Art Museum, and Konrad Fischer Galerie’s Düsseldorf and Berlin showrooms. Kretschmer builds up layered plywood constructions, lining them with vellum and coating them with strata of gesso to produce panels—her canvases, as it were—that she then bathes in silky opaque whites. Cutting into them with various tools, she creates intricate reliefs whose fissures she seals with beeswax. Striking a delicate balance between these elements, between foreground and background, planes and edges, Kretschmer makes surfaces with a spellbinding painterly aura while letting the work’s sculptural quality unfold into the third dimension.

The book is the first to offer comprehensive documentation of this extensive body of work, which is discussed in depth in essays by Stefanie Kreuzer, Guido Schlimbach and Lilly Wei.