Magalie Guérin bunker

Press Release

Opens Friday, January 26, 2018, 6-8 PM

It is with great pleasure that Corbett vs. Dempsey announces bunker, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Magalie Guérin. This is the gallery’s second exhibition with the artist, her first in the main space.

In her new work, Guérin continues to move into bold and surprising places. As always, she is acutely attentive to form, not just in terms of structure, the question of how things fit together, but also with respect to the plasticity of an impression, the way that even shallow intimations of depth can change an entire composition. As with paintings made over the last several years, the recent ones contain areas of actual relief or indentation – ridges, corregations, and canals that cross or conform to the bustling detail of her images. These areas activate the surface, moving towards a superflatness, beyond the picture plane onto the very surface of the paint, where attention condenses like water on a window in the winter. These new paintings also feature wonderful passages that are startlingly loose and translucent, as well as patterns – stripes, crisscrossing lines, repeated shapes – that introduce other kinds of complexity to the canvases. This gives them a strange mix of the organic and the inorganic, where bold black cartoonish hyperbola collide with gently undulating areas of pure color. The drawings offer a fascinating counterpoint with the paintings, stripping out the color and drawing attention to the way Guérin organizes the space of action. They are dazzling works of graphite, rather large (22″ x 18″), each one its own private ecosystem of shapes and marks and tones. A fully illustrated 52-page color catalog accompanies the show and is available at the opening.

Artist Page