Armory Show 2022

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new paintings by France-Lise McGurn at The Armory Show's 2022 edition.

 

France-Lise McGurn’s free-flowing, expressive gestures escape the boundaries of the traditional picture plane, bestowing a further sense of weightlessness to her dream-like aesthetic. Fluidity is the watchword in France-Lise McGurn’s elegant linear paintings.

 

The figures in McGurn’s paintings are recognizable without being narrative, seductive yet aloof, challenging the viewers with their distant and ambiguous gaze; inherently sexual yet ambivalent. Through their multifarious guises, they embody a sustained and collective presence, however fleeting their gestures might be. McGurn’s characters escape the boundaries of the traditional picture plane, bestowing a further sense of weightlessness and abandonment to the sensual composition.

 

This new body of works are to be placed in a site-specific immersive experience to drift across the canvas into the walls of Armory 2022. Here, McGurn’s practice takes on a more autographical trajectory. The ‘Collected images’ which inform the paintings have been given a more direct purpose in the studio. No longer reserved for ‘rehearsal’, source images appear more clearly through new elements such as clothing, motifs, and enhanced body gestures. The artist explains drawing as the quickest and most instantaneous route in; having always been really drawn to these ephemeral elements: notes and love letters. These new works delve further into immediacy with surprising elements such as smiley faces, cartoon characters and small drawings pinned to the surface. The works for this new presentation have been made not solely through the process of recollection and memory but with magazine cuttings and found images directly. Allowing these two elements to ‘un-synch’each other, playing with the temporality of the paintings whilst still prioritising fluidity, immediacy, and intuition.