France-Lise McGurn's Largest Show Unveiled in Dundee
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- France-Lise McGurn debuts The Charm Offensive at Dundee Contemporary Arts, a major new exhibition that marks a homecoming and expands her work to unprecedented scale.
- McGurn incorporates printed archival images—family photos, film stills, magazine ads—onto canvases, some fully obscured by paint, others left visible as ghostly underlayers or dominant elements.
- Motor, a large painting in the show, features a printed image of her childhood van overlaid with painted silhouettes of her daughter and late mother, Rita McGurn, forming an intergenerational portrait.
- McGurn includes physical objects from her studio in the exhibition, such as a paint-covered sofa, wallets, and other ephemera, inviting visitors to linger and engage with the space intimately.
- Katy Perry’s viral photo of kissing the Earth after a space-themed performance is among the archival images used, symbolizing a complex female relationship to harm, return, and reconciliation.
Why it matters: The exhibition shifts how McGurn’s work is experienced—not just as visual art but as immersive, lived space—materializing her mother’s feminist ethos that art belongs embedded in daily life. By exposing her source material and studio relics, she makes the private public without losing mystery, changing what viewers expect from contemporary painting.
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