FRANCE-LISE MCGURN

The title is taken from Deetour, a 1982 track by Philadelphia-born singer Karen Young - a song about a man who closes his eyes, rises, and finds his place somewhere out in space. It’s about escape as a state of mind, the detour not as a wrong turn but as the only route worth taking. McGurn first heard it played by a DJ at a Glasgow hotel bar where she worked in her twenties. Pop music, film and the city have always been central to her practice – and ideas of intimacy, freedom, solitude and motion are worked through new approaches to collage, painting in oil and marker directly onto digitally printed canvas. The collage holds things still; the painting pulls them back into motion.

The figures in DEE-TOUR inhabit the city through its texture of intimacy - present and absent at once, close to other bodies and entirely sealed inside themselves, the way one is on a dancefloor, a crowded train, or in the particular solitude of being among people. The Tube (2026) makes that condition almost uncomfortably precise - departing from a photograph taken on the London Underground, its darkness and compression of bodies in transit, onto which McGurn paints a sprawling yellow figure, luminous and unhurried. Ford Escort (2026) moves from the underground to the street, spray paint returning to McGurn’s practice after an absence. Two figures are brought together within a loosely architectural frame - recalling Bacon in the way it simultaneously encloses and exposes - their proximity tender and unresolved, while looping black marks and bursts of pink and green press in from the edges with the directness of graffiti. The car of the title is mundane and loaded in equal measure, its name alluding to a vehicle, police protection and paid companionship.

Postcards from the Edge (2026) takes its title from Mike Nichols’ 1990 film - the canvas divided into four, like a postage stamp on the back of a postcard, an object that exists only in motion, always between one place and another. Both this work and Big Plans (2026) enter into dialogue with R.B Kitaj (1932- 2007), a painter McGurn consistently returns to - another artist for whom moving between registers, between high and low, painted and collaged, literary and popular, was never a contradiction but a method.

As she has done at previous MASSIMODECARLO spaces and institutional exhibitions, McGurn will paint directly onto the walls and windows of DOMUSHAUS - the figures moving beyond the canvas and into the building, out toward the street.

DEE-TOUR was made alongside new work for a solo exhibition, The Charm Offensive, at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland, opening on 22 August 2026. She will also have a two-year commission at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia in early 2027. The detour always knew where it was going.

Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO.