Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing, artist books
Website: leonieguyer.com
Léonie Guyer was born in 1955 in New York City and has lived and worked in San Francisco for most of her career. She received her BFA (1985) and MFA (1989) from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, and San José State University. She was a Columnist in Residence on SFMOMA’s Open Space platform, where she contributed writing since 2012. She has been a collaborator with poets Bill Berkson and Franck André Jamme, producing artist books with both. In 2024 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her other awards include the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a Sites ReSeen Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, a John Anson Kittredge Foundation Fellowship, a California Arts Council Artist in Residence Grant (1995, 1996, 1997), and the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts. A notable connection: her Wattis Institute exhibition documentation was photographed by Phillip Maisel.
Guyer makes paintings, drawings, site-based wall works, prints, and artist books characterized by what she calls “reincarnations” — an invented repertoire of idiosyncratic shapes, neither fully geometric nor organic, that resist being named. The shapes are specific and individuated, occupying expansive chromatic fields, and are realized on carefully chosen surfaces: antique and salvaged paper, marble remnants, wooden panels, and directly onto walls and windows. She hand-mixes her own paints in small batches from pigment, linseed oil, and mineral spirits — an intimate, time-consuming process she describes as directly sensing the physical and energetic properties of each material. No two batches are identical. Her work is drawn toward the moment that precedes language — a space that cannot yet be recognized, named, or described — and her practice has been described by curator Anthony Huberman as making paintings that keep themselves “reduced to their bare essentials: color, surface, and shape.” The dialogue between ancient and contemporary is central: her choice of materials — Chartres-blue pigments, 18th-century French paper, marble — connects the work to millennia-long material traditions while remaining resolutely of the present.
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