FRANCE-LISE MCGURN

In The Charm Offensive, McGurn’s paintings spill from the canvas to walls, creating a site-specific installation where paintings created in the studio have a new life.   Her wall paintings make ‘new’ works already made – recontextualising them in the gallery space. She assembles varied images and exiled objects from the studio and city in constellations – implying location, time or feeling – and creates a sense of immediacy. This new development in her work is made possible by the scale of DCA galleries and the accompanying events programme, including her Artist’s Choice Screenings, films selected by McGurn to expand on and complement the exhibition.  

Butting print against paint, paper against “leather n lino” – the textures of domestic and city life form a landscape for interpreting the contemporary experience.   Printed collages are created as the artist paints directly onto materials she has lived with over time, rewatched, replayed or had an attachment to. 

The cycle of homage, destruction and creation becomes a new area of work; lines that spill from canvases on the wall now spray like graffiti onto magazines, TV sets or the family car.  The friction between the stillness of the printed image and the motion of oil paint and pixels shifts the rhythm, even in works that McGurn describes as “straight-up oil on canvas”.

Female forms are “part self-portrait, part observation, part memory”.  Scribed onto any available surface, they propose both sexual expression and a subversive reading of the body as a sexual, and sexualised, object. Contemplating states of ecstasy and censorship, these figures span a range of shifting archetypes, reflecting states of isolation and both carnal and commercial desire: part charm, part offensive. 

McGurn’s work captures the darkly comic charge of contemporary urban life in ways that feel both deeply personal and broadly resonant. Balancing immediacy with emotional depth, the installation evokes lived experience while interrogating hodesire is constructed, constrained and performed. Through layered imagery and painterly gesture, the exhibition reflects on the ways identity and longing are mediated through popular culture, memory and nostalgia, inviting viewers to construct narratives of their own.

Courtesy Dundee Contemporary Arts.