Waterfall

Gagosian is pleased to announce Waterfall, an exhibition of new works by Jennifer Guidi, opening on September 3 at the rue de Ponthieu gallery in Paris.

Guidi draws inspiration for this body of work from places she has experienced and imagined, expressing her meditations on the natural world and inner landscapes through vibrant colors and forms. She abstracts the elemental structures of nature to envision the convergence of the distinct yet interconnected forces that shape its features.

The radiant sun or moon centered in her paintings illuminates shorelines and beaches, gentle hills and soaring mountain ranges, placid oceans and cascading waterfalls.

“We can all relate to the feeling of being in nature,” Guidi notes, “walking on the beach, looking at a sunset, and knowing that this world is much larger than we are. I’m trying to gather all of that, take what I can from it, and put it onto canvas.”

Guidi conveys the dynamism of landscape through saturated colors and gradients. Bright pinks, violets, oranges, and yellows coalesce into passages of land and shore, juxtaposed with the blues and greens of oceans and lakes and the white of moving water.

Like the sand that comprises their grounds, the paintings are developed as accumulations of discrete brushstrokes brought together into a greater whole. This approach adapts the formal innovations of Pointillism introduced by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, dispersing a multitude of colorful dots across the canvas to create tremendous chromatic intensity.

Guidi is inspired as well by the Transcendental Painting Group, a collective of artists established in 1938 in Taos, New Mexico, who interpreted the geological features and spiritual energies of the Southwestern landscape in abstract terms. Their manifesto declared the aim “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.”

Significantly, the group’s sole Californian member was Agnes Pelton, who lived and worked for thirty years in Cathedral City, close to Guidi’s childhood home in Palm Desert, California.

Complementing the paintings, Waterfall also features a selection of gouache and watercolor works on paper.