Jennifer Guidi

Jennifer Guidi was born in Redondo Beach, California, in 1972. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Intricate in their execution and ambiguous in their reading, Jennifer Guidi’s paintings oscillate across a broad spectrum of association. Beginning with a colourful under-painting or with raw linen, Guidi obscures this initial layer through the application of a cement-like mixture of sand, paint and acrylic polymers. While still wet, this sedimented exterior is then carefully manipulated by hand carved tools, teased and parted to reveal the base-layer beneath through hundreds of small indentations. Her work furthers Modernist histories of minimalism and spiritual abstraction, recalling perhaps Agnes Martin’s subtle geometric repetitions or Hilma af Klint’s seraphic forms and auratic color gradients: occult renderings that connect earthly material to aether. Guidi’s meditative process of developing compositional radial systems, in which “starting points” generate centrifugal mark-making force that often begin slightly left to represent the heart as an energy source, manifest loose, spherical circulatory systems of elliptic ovals, like blood coursing through veins and arteries, pinning meridian points. Guidi’s work is included in prominent collections such as the Hammer Museum and the Rubell Family Collection among others.