Magalie Guérin

About

The term solute is defined as, “the minor component in a solution.” Within the context of the exhibition, each finished painting serves as a step in the artist’s process to create a fully resolved body of work. Revisiting and continuing to build upon previous works, has always been a part of Guérin’s method of art making. For this exhibition, the artist incorporates this revisionist tendency into her initial process. She creates multiple works simultaneously that intentionally repeat forms, each manipulated to new ends. Through restructuring her own process, Guérin questions what it means to complete a work of art. At the moment when her shapes fall into place, a composition might be resolved, but it is never fixed. 

Although characteristically abstract, Guérin’s paintings operate within a figurative strategy, devoting special attention to figure-ground relationships. Multifarious surfaces of diverse textures simultaneously reinforce the flatness of the picture plane and suggest hints of illusionistic depth. Corrugations beneath the paint provide skeletal structures—which her forms either obey or transgress—imposing a three-dimensional counterpart for her colorful articulations. Swaths of stony greys, hazy greens, and warm beiges, balance accents of radioactive yellows, candy corn oranges, and bold blacks. Her shifting colors and forms prevent the viewer from settling into any uniform perspective, making for a uniquely active and dynamic viewing experience.

Magalie Guérin (b. 1973, Montreal) currently lives and works in Chicago. In 2011, she received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions were presented at James Harris, Seattle; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; Schwarz Contemporary, Berlin; and Anat Egbi, Los Angeles. Guérin’s work is in the collection of DePaul Art Museum. She is the author of NOTES ON, a compilation of studio writings published by The Green Lantern Press in 2016. Guérin was recently awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2018), a Chinati Foundation residency (2018), and the Stephen Pace Residency Award for a Mid-Career Painter at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2019).