Magalie Guérin Artist Talk

SomoS resident artist and French-Canadian painter Magalie Guérin will share with us the visual, intellectual and emotional aspects of her abstract painting process. Having recently completed a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas before arriving for her three-month residency at SomoS in Berlin, Guérin will also discuss how the different environments from Marfa’s solitude and serenity to Berlin’s urban hustle and bustle have impacted her work.

Process-wise, Guérin’s work begins with the building of a specific shape, generated using multiple coats of gesso on canvas, creating grooves and textures. A lover of seriality, Guérin repeats the resulting relief form on multiple canvases, where she then intuitively adds oil paint and watches the fixed shapes resist monotony.

Guérin’s way of working has been described as having a de-stabilizing quality for the viewer, as Art In America magazine noted, “her works jettison the pictorial order of background and foreground, as many pure abstractions do. Moreover, they thwart the viewer’s efforts to understand the chronology of their strata—to know which thing precedes another.”

“The completed painting reflects the history of its construction (the psychology of its maker) –a process I’m most interested in. There is a clear individuality to each of the works; a result I find compelling and will spend much time analyzing through writing.”
– Magalie Guérin

Magalie Guérin (1973) is a Chicago-based artist, who continues her work in Berlin, after concluding a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (the contemporary art museum founded by the artist Donald Judd). She is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago. A selection from Guérin’s studio journal was published to popular and critical acclaim as “NOTES ON” by the Chicago-based Green Lantern Press, in March 2016. Guérin’s solo exhibition of drawings “Morgenspaziergang” is on view at Schwarz Contemporary Berlin from 29.6 – 28.7.2018.