leonieguyer — House Of Seiko

Léonie Guyer

Three and Three and One

October 18 - November 24, 2024

Opening reception:

October 18, 2024
5:30 - 8:30 pm

checklist
inquiries: cole@houseofseiko.info

We are thrilled to announce an exhibition of new work by San Francisco-based artist, Léonie Guyer.

Léonie Guyer (b. 1955, New York, New York) is a painter. Her work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes deployed in a variety of spaces. The shapes conflate geometric and organic structures; while specific and individuated, they resist being named. The intimately scaled forms reside in expansive chromatic fields. Her exacting work is realized on antique and salvaged paper, marble remnants, panels, walls and windows. The use of particular materials and contexts extends the dialogue in her practice between the ancient and contemporary. A regard for simplicity, nuance, and ambiguity guides the process.

Guyer’s work has been exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College; lumber room, Portland, OR; Bibeau Krueger, NYC; Feature Inc., NYC; Peter Blum Gallery, NYC; and elsewhere.

Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon; Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; among others. She lives and works in San Francisco, and received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.

In 2024 Guyer was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant; Sites ReSeen Grant, New York State Council on the Arts; John Anson Kittredge Foundation Fellowship; California Arts Council Artist in Residence Grant; Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts, San Francisco Foundation.

Press Release by Evan Moore:

Léonie Guyer
Three and Three and One

Léonie Guyer has spent a handful of decades scouring roads of refuse and reams of centuries-old paper in search of something to mark. She shares a formative story about attending an Art History course at the San Francisco Art Institute, where the margins of her notes begin to populate with the earliest iterations of her enigmatic forms. This quasi-scholarly communion with centuries of aesthetic history has yet to cease. As one sits with the work, allusions to Cycladic marbles, Goryeo Dynasty celadon vessels, or posture from Mannerist painting begin to bubble in one's mind. When asked where her forms originate, the artist plainly states, “I don’t know. They are arrived at.”.

For Guyer, the substrates transmitting her forms are an integral component to entering them. The marble is reclaimed from offcuts unworthy of luxury kitchen and bathroom remodels in San Francisco. Their prefabricated nature often presents a serendipitous tension between precise cuts and rough, seemingly archaeological corners. Once a form is determined, Guyer incises its boundaries into the marble then carefully builds layers of pigment to develop its permeating aura. One can most presently detect a ghostly pentimento in, Untitled, no. 116, where the remnants of a previous form can be seen caressing its fully developed inhabitant.

This recessed quality of the erased form is echoed throughout the works on paper. The agate-burnished double weight Indian jute paper is made by Mohammed Hussein Khagzi using traditional Indian paper making techniques. Production of this paper has recently ceased, blank pages destined to go extinct. Guyer’s interventions are sensitive, their fluidity complements the unusual soft sheen and organic composition of the rectilinear plane. These forms seem to hover between legibility and illegibility on the page in contrast to the decided behavior of the forms on marble.

The three marble works and three works on paper are orchestrated across the primary walls of the gallery. The one referenced in the exhibition’s title introduces a new site-based painting nestled in between the gallery’s folding security gate and exterior window. Informed by the architecture, history, and social structures of the space, the site-based painting will ideally accompany that wall until its opportunity to confound archaeologists excavating the remains of San Francisco.

Three and Three and One incorporates key throughlines of Guyer’s approach to form and material; their alchemy presents a negation to be fully deciphered. Joining a tradition of objects born from civilization lost, rendering their full comprehension impossible. Instead of a didactic method of knowing one must relinquish their desire to over analyze and engage with unknowing.

photography courtesy of Graham Holoch