MONIQUE VAN GENDEREN

Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Monique van Genderen, on view 8 December 2022 through 28 January 2023 at 511 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Dr. Moran Sheleg.

Expanding upon the legacy of the women of Abstract Expressionism, Monique van Genderen has created a unique contemporary language characterized by painterly gesture and bold color juxtapositions. Her surfaces teeter between opacity and translucence with her deft use of metallic, luminescent, and pearlescent paints. The many brushstrokes, characters, punction marks, and biomorphic forms are muses that float within her paintings. Scale, too, plays an integral role in her practice, oscillating between micro and macro visual experiences.

Throughout the exhibition, “quotation mark” works depict the motifs as characters but also serve as brackets containing her many painting references. The employment of repetition establishes each gesture and decision as irrevocable. A playfully rebellious streak runs through the wildly ambitious and deliberate new works on view, offering an epiphany of beauty, but also of captivating intrigue. Viewers are invited in to navigate, engage, and converse with the paintings in a mind-bending game of reference and recall.

As Dr. Moran Sheleg writes, “This is painting as a conceptual illusion, which reaches into our minds through our eyes and thus reverses the age-old adage—echoed by artists from Marcel Duchamp to Gerhard Richter and beyond—that painting is the work of conceit and idiocy. Instead, it reimagines what a painting that has the potential to change one’s perspective as a person, however short-lived or unexpected, might look like.”

Monique van Genderen (b. 1965, Vancouver, Canada) received her Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA.

She has presented solo exhibitions most recently at Bernier/Eliades, Brussels, Belgium; Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin, Germany; and Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA. Her past presentations include the Hammer Museum Lobby Project, Los Angeles, CA; “Monique van Genderen,” survey exhibition at Kunstverein Heilbronn, Heilbronn, Germany; “Festaal,” Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, Germany; “Monique van Genderen and Kirsten Everberg,” Le Consortium, Dijon, France; “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Abstrakt Maler,” Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo, Norway; “Monique van Genderen,” D’Amelio Gallery, New York, NY; “Personal Exhibition,” The Happy Lion Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Effearte, Milan, Italy; and Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium.

Van Genderen has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions such as the Albertina Museum,Vienna, Austria; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Kunstverein am Rosa–Luxemburg–Platz, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego,CA; Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen, Germany; and the U.S. Embassy, Paramaribo, Suriname.

Her work may be found in the collections of the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, Peoria, IL; Eileen Harris Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Montblanc Cutting Edge Art Collection, Hamburg, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; the U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.

She is the recipient of a Project Commission for the Murals for La Jolla, La Jolla, CA; the Chiaro Award, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; Federal Courthouse Building Art Commission for the GSA, Arts and Architecture Program, Harrisburg, PA; and the West Hollywood 1% for the Arts Public Art Commission, West Hollywood, CA. In 2004, she was an Artist in Residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX.

The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

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Selected Works

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