Melissa Huddleston
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present Melissa Huddleston: The Drops, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition runs from April 25 through June 6, 2026. An opening reception will be held Saturday, April 25th from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Melissa Huddleston: The Drops introduces a new series of paintings on paper made from single droplets of paint. Layered one after another, forms emerge from the tensions of precision, timing, and the volume of each drop. The process invites both happenstance and restraint, shaped by the unique chemical properties of the materials themselves.
The Drops may be viewed in the context of the California Light and Space movement. As with the best work of that era, the series manifests a decisive, apparent simplicity that can only be achieved through extended, focused, daily practice. At the same time, in its intimacy, femininity, and unabashed hyper-fertility—developed while the artist was pregnant with her son—the work resonates with threads of post-1970 feminist art.
Concentricity is the narrative rule. Inner forms follow outer forms in radiant hues and colorful, auric halos of varying opacities. The fluidity of the paint is used not simply to define pools of pigment applied upon their support, as in much of late modernist art, but to orchestrate their interactions. Circular shapes suggest both the macroscopic and microscopic, the celestial and the cellular. Ovoids evoke eggs, stretched spheres, or breasts. Displaced droplets create eclipse-like occlusions. Steeped in California moon magic, the paintings consider a fundamental question: how does one thing become two?
The relationships between the droplets suggest metaphors of nurture, growth, and division at the most elemental levels.
The exhibition extends into a second gallery, where Huddleston installs a mural-sized work composed of dozens of marbled paintings on paper. Repeating the same sequence of movements and paint application on the marbling bath can produce a set of highly similar images, each with subtle differences. When these images are juxtaposed in a large grid, secondary patterns emerge. Their interplay can feel almost cinematic, suggesting motion, deep water, and flickering light.
The paint layer is ethereal, delicate, whisper-thin. Walk by quickly, and you might miss it. The surface invites slow, attentive observation of the infinite modulations of color across a single tonal field. Instead of depicting a mythical singular moment of fertilization, the paintings, by emphatically insisting on their own process, enact a continuous mode of becoming.
Melissa Huddleston (b.1981, Elm Springs, AR) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, where she studied painting under Ed Bereal. Huddleston has been an artist in residence at The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New Berlin, NY. Her work is held in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute and MoMA library, and has been featured in the publications Artforum, XTRA, L.A. Weekly, and Hyperallergic.