Melissa Middleberg

Melissa Middleberg is a New York-based figurative painter whose work explores memory, family history, and interpersonal relationships through the visual language of photography. Drawing from a lifelong fascination with personal and found photographs, she approaches these images almost archaeologically, searching for clues about the people, places, and relationships they preserve.

Working in oil on canvas and panel, Middleberg translates photographs of social gatherings, domestic interiors, family members, and everyday moments into intimate painted scenes. Removed from their original photographic context, these images become spaces in which past and present overlap, revealing the subtle gestures and unspoken dynamics that exist between people and across generations.

At the center of Middleberg’s practice is an interest in the relationship between photography and recollection: how images become vessels for personal and collective histories, and how those histories shift as they are remembered, inherited, and reinterpreted. Her paintings preserve the specificity of individual moments while considering the ways memory continually reshapes our understanding of the past.