Tag: Jennifer Guidi

Jennifer Guidi, raised in Southern California, moved between Manhattan Beach and Orange County before settling in Palm Desert. Despite her parents lacking a visual art background, Guidi developed a keen interest, taking art classes from a young age. By her high school freshman year, she aimed to attend art school.

At Boston University, Guidi focused on painting and printmaking, emphasizing traditional techniques and human body representations. Her primary subjects were portraits, including self-portraits and friends. In 1994, she earned her BFA, followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. Guidi relocated to Los Angeles in 2001, continuing her artistic journey.

In 2005, Jennifer Guidi debuted her inaugural solo exhibition at ACME. in Los Angeles, unveiling eleven intricately-scaled oil paintings on linen. Notably drawing comparisons to the styles of Sam Francis and Fairfield Porter, Guidi, at that time, focused on representational paintings of landscapes, plants, and insects.

Her artistic evolution took a turn during a 2012 trip to Marrakech, where she became captivated by the intricate patterns of Moroccan rugs, particularly the detailed stitching on their rarely seen verso sides. Shifting from representation to abstraction, Guidi began painting from photographs of these woven surfaces, leading to the creation of the abstract oil and sand paintings series titled Field Paintings. This series premiered at LAXART in 2014, featuring rows of minuscule, tactile impressions and marking the introduction of sand into Guidi’s work.

In 2017, Guidi showcased her first solo museum exhibition at the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa, Italy. This exhibit showcased large-scale sand and acrylic paintings, meticulously painted in the seven colors of the light spectrum, adorning the frescoed interior walls of the neoclassical Italian villa. Guidi’s recent paintings, characterized by mandala-like compositions, delve into methodically-produced meditations on light and color. Comparisons have been drawn to the works of Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Light and Space artists.

Jennifer Guidi’s impactful contributions are evident in public collections such as the Hammer Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Marciano Art Foundation, and the Rubell Family Collection.