Magalie Guérin: hard green

Corbett vs. Dempsey is delighted to present hard green, an exhibition of new paintings by Magalie Guérin. This is the artist's third solo show at the gallery; Guérin was also the subject of a Big Dig online presentation in 2020 titled The Lekeitio Drawings.

Born in Montréal, Canada, now based in Marfa, Texas, Guérin has continued to prod and push her highly personal approach to abstract painting. The latest body of work offers a remarkable new vision of the torqued forms and multiplicitous surfaces of her recent paintings, executed at a larger scale ranging up to 3 x 4 feet. At this size, additional area functions as a vehicle for opening up and exploring space, for spatial play – her adventures in foreground/background relationships, figure-ground issues, and closed/open composition are as ever daring, but here are even more so, complexity and stillness vs. implied motion being consistent features. Guérin is a master of recurrent shapes, rotating or flipping forms to render them afresh and unrecognizable, the same way a serial composer might use retrograde inversion to revitalize a tone row. She repeats and deconstructs with glee, turning self-restriction into a cornucopia of new discoveries. The most obvious development in hard green has to do with Guérin's paint application, which is looser and more painterly than in the past. This gives the canvases a different resolution in terms specifically of their overall vibration. Their architecture jostles up against the manner of their execution, creating a halo of static electricity. "It feels like a structure that just got shaken up," says Guérin. Indeed, this group of new paintings, as well as a small selection of related drawings in the front office, has a palpable frisson, a restless inventiveness that seems to undo its laces even as it ties them up.

Magalie Guérin has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal (2020), Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London (2020), Chapter NY, New York (2019), James Harris Gallery, Seattle (2018), Schwartz Contemporary, Berlin (2018), Anat Egbi, Los Angeles (2017), and Lyles & King, New York (2015). She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She is the author of NOTES ON, published by Green Lantern Press in 2016.

Magalie Guérin, Untitled, 2022, oil on canvas, 45 x 36 inches. Photo: Nathan Keay