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拍品专文
Towering more than two metres in height, Purple Rain (Painted Pink Sand SF #2F, Purple CS) (2016) is a beguiling large-scale example of Jennifer Guidi’s hypnotic, textural abstract practice. In her signature process, the artist prepared the canvas with a painted underlayer before covering it with a thick compound of acrylic and sand: here, a rich purple surface was laid over a backdrop of shimmering pink and golden tones. With short strokes of a wooden dowel, Guidi then incised the still-wet sediment to reveal flashes of the undercoat below, creating whorls of dotted pattern that radiate outwards from a point towards the upper centre. Neon pink paint fluoresces at the indents’ edges, heightening the work’s optical splendour. Working intuitively, and guided by her interest in sand mandalas, Enlightenment colour theory and the Hindu energy system of chakras, Guidi conjures a work that exerts a near-magnetic pull from its iridescent depths, vibrating with meditative power and hinting at realities beyond the surface appearance of the world.
Born in Redondo Beach, California, Guidi earned her BFA from Boston University in 1995, and her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. Upon her move to Los Angeles at the start of the millennium—where she still lives and works today—she began to experiment with sand in her works, inspired by the natural, shifting tactility of the West Coast beaches. Her ‘sand-painting’ technique came to its full fruition, however, following a trip to Morocco in 2012 in search of colourful Berber rugs. She was particularly struck by the rugs’ undersides, where the handwoven, knotted and threaded patterns produced tonal bas-reliefs of obscure sign and symbol. Working with her own repetitive, abstract motifs, she began to create abstract, dotted compositions that spoke to spiritual and psychedelic themes. In their use of transcendent, repetitive pattern, they recall Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings, their overlaid, spectral colours pulsating together like energy fields. The present work, with its complex palette and mesmeric, rippling surface, resounds with cosmic majesty.
While looking far beyond the Western art canon, Guidi also cites the inspiration of the great American painters Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keeffe—who both drew upon the deserts and mountains of New Mexico in their work—as well as the pioneering mystic abstractionist Hilma af Klint. Colour, for Guidi, is a universal and uplifting source of energy. ‘On an intuitive level,’ she says, ‘I’m guided by the colours in nature’ (J. Guidi quoted in L. Fried, ‘Jennifer Guidi’, Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2020). Her works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Dallas Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
Born in Redondo Beach, California, Guidi earned her BFA from Boston University in 1995, and her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. Upon her move to Los Angeles at the start of the millennium—where she still lives and works today—she began to experiment with sand in her works, inspired by the natural, shifting tactility of the West Coast beaches. Her ‘sand-painting’ technique came to its full fruition, however, following a trip to Morocco in 2012 in search of colourful Berber rugs. She was particularly struck by the rugs’ undersides, where the handwoven, knotted and threaded patterns produced tonal bas-reliefs of obscure sign and symbol. Working with her own repetitive, abstract motifs, she began to create abstract, dotted compositions that spoke to spiritual and psychedelic themes. In their use of transcendent, repetitive pattern, they recall Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings, their overlaid, spectral colours pulsating together like energy fields. The present work, with its complex palette and mesmeric, rippling surface, resounds with cosmic majesty.
While looking far beyond the Western art canon, Guidi also cites the inspiration of the great American painters Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keeffe—who both drew upon the deserts and mountains of New Mexico in their work—as well as the pioneering mystic abstractionist Hilma af Klint. Colour, for Guidi, is a universal and uplifting source of energy. ‘On an intuitive level,’ she says, ‘I’m guided by the colours in nature’ (J. Guidi quoted in L. Fried, ‘Jennifer Guidi’, Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2020). Her works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Dallas Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.