France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless installation
Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless Tate Britain presents ‘Sleepless’, a site-specific exhibition of new, figurative paintings by: France-Lise McGurn exploring the experience of city life. 29 June – 8 September 2019.]]>
Source: Tate Britain
France-Lise McGurn (b.1983) is a Glasgow-based artist who predominantly works with painting and drawing to create fluid works that spill from the canvas onto the gallery walls, floors and ceilings. In her work McGurn draws on a collected archive of found imagery to create figurative installations which express notions of sexuality, ecstasy, loss and consciousness. For “Sleepless”, McGurn’s visual sources have included a book of ‘erotic aerobics’ as well as a 90s cult book celebrating a decade of a notorious night club in Ibiza.
”Sleepless” explores the experience of living in a city as one that is intimate and inherently sexual. The exhibition title itself evokes key themes in McGurn’s work, including partying, dreams, longing, motherhood and nostalgic popular culture, recalling the 1993 romantic comedy “Sleepless in Seattle”. Working intuitively rather than through direct appropriation, McGurn’s uses swift brushstrokes, spontaneous lines and repeated marks to create loose associations about place and history, inviting viewers to conjure their own narratives. In 2018 she was commissioned to create a wall painting for Tate St Ives’s stairwell following a residency at the gallery. The resulting artwork, Collapsing New People, drew upon the town’s history as an artist’s colony and loosely visualised the gossip, anecdotes and parties that might have taken place there.
Art Now is a series of free exhibitions at Tate Britain focusing on new and recent work by emerging artists. Since the 1990s, Art Now has recognized talent at its outset and provided a launching platform for artists who have gone on to become established figures on the international art scene. The series has recently included Joanna Piotrowska, Jesse Darling, Lisa Brice and Marguerite Humeau.
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