LONDON.- Simon Lee Gallery is presenting France-Lise McGurn's installation Aloud, The exposé, on view from 20 December 2022 - 14 January 2023.

Composed of a wooden frame and painted Perspex panels, McGurn’s characteristically fluid figures are all the more dynamic when presented across transparent screens, appearing to reach, lean and leap through the air. The outline of faces, torsos and limbs traverse painterly swathes of colour to form a narrative-defying ensemble of figures, crested by glowing neons.

First exhibited at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum as part of Glasgow International festival over summer 2021, Aloud, The exposé also draws on the artist’s personal experiences of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum; the hours she spent there as a child and then later as an adult, inhabiting but also observing. Albert Moore’s painting, Reading Aloud (1884), was a key a point of departure for McGurn, in particular Moore’s positioning of models, the work’s varied textures, and its ambiguous lack of urgency or context.

France-Lise McGurn’s immersive works are renowned for their ability to transport viewers from the public realm of the gallery space to the most personal quarters of the artist’s mind and life. Aloud, The exposé engages with several recurring themes within McGurn’s practice, especially the dichotomies of presence and absence, and interior versus exterior lives. The installation also extends upon McGurn’s figurative practice across painting, site-specific wall works and, in particular, her works on paper which often spill out onto the glass of their uniquely crafted frames, serving to challenge the restrictive two-dimensionality of traditional painting.

The gallery re-opened 3 January 2023.

Born in 1983, France-Lise McGurn lives and works in Glasgow, UK. After completing her studies at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, UK, she obtained her masters at the Hunter College of Art, New York, NY and the Royal College of Art, London, UK, both in 2012. In 2005, she was awarded the John Kinross Scholarship to Florence by the Royal Scottish Academy. She has also received the John Milne Purvisprize (2005) and the Jeremy Cubitt prize (2010). Her work has been the subject of a number of solo museum and gallery exhibitions, most recently: Glasgow International, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, UK (2021), Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2020); Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2020); Tramway, Glasgow, UK (2020); Tate Britain, London, UK (2019); Hospital field House, Arbroath, UK (2018); Alison Jacques Gallery, London, UK (2017) and Bosse and Baum, London, UK (2016). Recent group exhibitions include the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Rugby, UK (2022), the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, UK (2019); CCA, Glasgow, UK (2018); Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK which travelled to Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK and The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (2018); Une Une Une, Perpignan, France (2017) and David Roberts Collection, London, UK (2017).