The artist, who hails form the city of Wroclaw in Poland, where he holds the position of Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, populates his non-representational canvases with recurring geometric motifs. This and his employment of a limited palette of dominant colors, imposes, at the macro level, a certain visual discipline to his works. However, just as the ordered geometric patterns of streets and buildings of townscapes viewed from an airplane window dissolve into a myriad less ordered details as the plane's altitude drops for landing, so too the ordered first impressions given by Merkel's canvases dissolve into complexities of form and color, streaks, thin layers, and fractured surfaces that suggest a complex and three dimensional texture. A sparing infusion of luminous colors, contrasting with the painting's dominant and often constrained pallette of darkish hues, serve to enliven and direct the viewers attention.

Opening with a reception from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Monday, July 24 in the College's Duns Scotus Hall Art Gallery the exhibition, cosponsored by the College's Art Department and the Polish Arts Club, will be open on weekdays from 9 am to 4 pm. It will feature a cycle of Merkel's recent canvases. These include not only ones in which the geometric forms appear to clash, but also recent works, in which the paintings' rectangular grid pattern clashes with the very shape of the canvas which the artist has begun to remove from the rectangular.

Daemen College is located at 4380 Main Street in Amherst, one block west of Harlem Road. For enquiries, phone the Daemen Art Department - 839-8241

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