Jennifer Guidi
Born in 1972 in Southern California, Jennifer Guidi’s work reflects the deep influence of the sun-soaked landscape of her youth and its particular traditions of painting. Guidi not only draws on West Coast abstraction but also Light and Space art, Modernism, Minimalism and even Buddhist mandala painting to create colorful abstractions of modern natural experiences, from dawn at the beach to the smog of Los Angeles. Her time-consuming process is meditative, rhythmically using a wooden dowel to carve patterns into her signature mixture of sand and thick paint. Her final, remarkably textured paintings seem to radiate outward from their center.
Guidi studied art at Boston University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before settling in Los Angeles. There she debuted as a figurative painter in the early 2000s but produced relatively little for the following decade until, in 2014, she returned with new abstract paintings inspired by a trip to Morocco. Today, in addition to West Coast abstractionist painters like Richard Diebenkorn and Helen Lundeberg, Giudi’s repetitive patterns recall the obsessive dots of Pop artist Yayoi Kusama. In fact, Giudi’s paintings were shown alongside works by Kusama and Anicka Yi at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2016. She has also shown her work at prestigious institutions including the Hammer Museum and the Marciano Art Foundation.
- Energy of Love (Painted Universe Mandala SF #4F, Red, Natural Ground), 2018, Oil, acrylic and sand on linen, 92 x 74 inches (233.7 x 188 cm), a representative recent work that recently set the artist’s auction record
- Sunset (Painted Light Pink Grey Sand SF #1F, Orange Blue Pink Lavender and Yellow), 2017, Sand, acrylic and oil on linen, 92 × 74 inches (233.7 × 188 cm), a representative painting reproduced in CULTURED
- Untitled (TRF #4 Black, White and Red), 2015, Oil on linen, 92 x 74 inches (233.68 x 187.96 cm), shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and in the Rubell Family Collection