Magalie Guérin: a hand a hand

The title of the exhibition, a hand a hand, is derived from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a text in which language becomes object-like: tactile, cadenced, and stubbornly physical. Words are handled rather than explained. They are turned over, repeated, nudged into new relationships. Meaning arrives sideways. Like Stein’s writing, Guérin’s work opens a space where recognition is slippery.

For Guérin, making is a process of discovery rather than description. Though developed through different processes and materials, the two bodies of work share a common language and an ongoing dialogue. The paintings evolve through a sequence of revisions, hesitations, and returns, while her sculptures take shape through stacking, balancing, and improvisation. Areas of rich color, raised edges, palpable textures, and amorphous shapes reappear throughout both mediums, as though testing their possibilities through different states of being.

In one of the largest paintings Guérin has done to date, we witness an ongoing negotiation between figure and ground. Swaths of tea green set the stage for a chartreuse limb-like form that inserts itself into a tectonic, striated field. In one of the ceramic sculptures, a black and white gridded form suggests a fishtail, or a quotation mark balancing playfully, threatening to swoop down. In both mediums, the artist’s hand reveals itself through scribbles, scrapes and impastoed surfaces.

The works in a hand a hand resist definitive interpretation while remaining insistently present. They gather associations and visual rhymes, and propose that we navigate by intuition, memory, and sensation. Across painting and sculpture, Guérin’s works are segmented yet remain surprisingly resolved. In 2023, John Yau wrote “Guérin depicts a world of gravity and space occupied by shapes that are both specific and unknown.” This assertive ambiguity is foundational to the work of Magalie Guérin, and it asks us to consider alternatives to naming what we see, in her work and beyond.

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 the Esker Foundation in Calgary (AB), Sikkema Jenkins & Co (NY), Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago), Galerie Nicolas Robert (Montreal), and Amanda Wilkinson (London), amongst others. Notable group exhibitions include Abstraction, Continued at the Speed Art Museum, ICAF at the Gardiner Museum, 50 Paintings at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Master Class at Secrist Beach (Chicago), and With a Capital P: Selections by Six Painters at Elmhurst Museum. 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 Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York, and Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montreal.