Magalie Guérin
Violet, Rift

From October 24 to November 23, 2024

Galerie Nicolas Robert Toronto is pleased to present Violet, Rift, Magalie Guérin’s latest body of work and first solo exhibition in Toronto. Resisting categorization, this new series of paintings continues her inquiry into color and shape as subject, pushing beyond a dialectic of representation or abstraction. The generous interplay of colors is complex, precise and finely tuned – where a fluorescent green, deep umber, or glowing violet can enter the pictorial plane as a character, and the figure/ground space of still life and landscape genres merge. Skillfully weaving background and foreground, the works allow our vision and simultaneous attention to oscillate between unpredictable texture, color, line, and form. Guérin both seeks and offers an experience of foreignness, presenting the unknown as invigorating new formal encounters. By generously avoiding visual resolve, these works allow us to develop our own questions and understanding.

Magalie Guérin (b. Montreal, 1973) is an artist based in Marfa, TX. She holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where she resided for over a decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at Sikkema Jenkins, NY (2023); Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2022); Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal, Toronto (2024,2020); and Amanda Wilkinson, London (2020), amongst others. Notable group exhibitions include 50 Paintings at the Milwaukee Art Museum (2023); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2023) and Anton Kern WINDOW, NY (2021).

Her work is in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Speed Art Museum, DePaul Art Museum, Hydro-Québec, and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. She is the author of NOTES ON, a compilation of studio writings published by The Green Lantern Press in 2016 (second edition 2019), and teaches at SAIC and College of DuPage. Guérin is the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner grants (2024, 2018), a Pace Award for a mid-career painter at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2019) and a Chinati Foundation residency (2018). She is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York, Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, and Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montreal, Toronto.