Heather Guertin
Born 1981 Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Lives and works in New York
Launch : New York, 2021
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Heather Guertin’s practice, grounded in painting, has included performance, writing and humor, all of which engage the relationship between observation and imaginative expression. Her current paintings developed from these ways of working and express the openness of painting as a formal practice. Through her painterly approach she achieves an autonomous physicality rendering them into psychological and imaginative works. Her paintings contain a diverse variety of mark-making and reference a large personal collection of visual subject matter. She uses abstraction as a passageway to better understand form. Each translation from image to paint is a subjective decision. Guertin ties different fragments of imagery together and transforms it into a new whole. Through this process, the painting finds its own logic, making it impossible to locate the original source. This combination of observation and invention results in a tension between illusionistic space and the flatness of pure color. Despite the material similarities they are highly individual works.
Heather received her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She will have an upcoming two person exhibition at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City and a solo exhibition at JDJ Ice House in Garrison, NY. Past solo exhibitions include Two Thousand Eighteen, Brennan & Griffin, NY, Aluminum Linoleum, Proyectos Monclova, MX and The Whole, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Group exhibitions include Grouper, Broadway, NY, How to Call the Spirits, Chapter, NY, East Side to the West Side, Flag Art Foundation, NY, and Addicted to Highs and Lows, Bortolami, NY. She has performed in locations such as White Columns in New York and in participation with the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2013, Guertin published a novella titled Model Turned Comedian with Social Malpractice and Publication Studio, which was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. In 2015 a monograph of her works was published by Hassla Books.