France-Lise McGurn - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale Hong Kong Thursday, March 30, 2023 | Phillips

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  • France-Lise McGurn made a notable impression with her solo exhibition titled Sleepless at the Tate Britain in 2019. The exhibition was creatively designed to be site-specific, with her figures sprawled on canvas and directly against the walls, ceiling, and floors. During an interview with Tate, she provided a comprehensive explanation of her artistic approach:

     

    Tate: How do you find your ideas and how you bring them into fruition?

     

    France-Lise McGurn: I have a massive collection of found materials that feed into my work in a very indirect way. The majority, at the moment, are magazines. They are rarely from contemporary sources, purely because when something is from the past, the original intent of it is gone. It just becomes material and it becomes a way of psychologically looking at the past and thinking about where we are now. I look at a lot of old magazines like Jackie Magazine and others like it.

     

    A lot of the times, a lot of the materials I look at are things that have been designed to be disseminated and then discarded. Like flyers, posters, magazines - anything printed. When I've collected these, I loosely draw on paper, draw at home, draw in the studio based on the themes. Then, I'll find that certain motifs will come out of that, and that will become a repeated motif in the rest of the work, so that when I get into the space, I have this bank of gestures, shapes and forms that I can pull out, really quickly, without having to step through a pile of stuff because I want the figures to be really familiar. I feel like I know the figures I draw and know what year they're from or where they're from. It’s not an exact appropriation, but the figures are based on what I’ve seen.

     

    Tate: Is there anything you want audiences to come away from when they leave the space?

     

    France-Lise McGurn: I want the gallery space to be full of energy, and I think as long as people feel that and get some life from it, then that's okay. I don't know that I would ever want to be didactical or pre-prescribe a narrative for anyone. Something can be familiar, but also energetic. I wouldn't want to force anyone to feel anything different than that. It’s like any good work. As an artist, you would want it to offer more than that, but you cannot control that part.

     

    Read more here

     

    • Provenance

      Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong
      Private Collection
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Biel, Kunsthaus Pasquart, France-Lise Mcgurn: Bodytronic, 19 September - 22 November 2020

220

Sin and Syncope

signed, titled and dated '"SIN & SYNCOPE" FL McG 2020' on the overlap
acrylic on canvas
219.7 x 199.8 cm. (86 1/2 x 78 5/8 in.)
Executed in 2020.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
HK$240,000 - 350,000 
€27,800-40,500
$30,800-44,900

Sold for HK$609,600

Contact Specialist

Danielle So
Specialist, Head of Day Sale
+852 2318 2027
danielleso@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

Hong Kong Auction 31 March 2023