Léonie Guyer (born January 1, 1955, in New York City) is a contemporary artist based in San Francisco. She makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, prints, and artist books. Her post-minimalist abstract work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces.
Guyer's 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.
Early life and education Guyer was born in 1955 in New York City. She received her B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Work Guyer’s main interest is in simplicity, ambiguity, and the dynamic between the intimate and the expansive. Rooted in drawing, Guyer’s work resists binaries, commingling the organic and geometric, and the fragment and whole. Her paintings are informed by a critical rethinking of form, substrate, context, and temporality.
In his exhibition text, Anthony Huberman, the Director and Chief Curator of CCA Wattis Institute, writes:
“Léonie Guyer makes paintings and drawings. They consist mostly of abstract shapes, usually modest in scale, made with oil paint or pencil. In her mind, an artwork is a place where countless decisions are condensed and compacted together, and she works to intensify that concentration by keeping her paintings small and reduced down to their bare essentials: color, surface, and shape. She tries to do the most with the least. And yet to call her works “small” is misleading. Better would be to say that she makes “immeasurable” works of art, which doesn't mean that they are epic in scale but simply that they are not meant to be measured.”
Awards and fellowships In 2024 Guyer was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards include: Tosa Studio Award: Finalist Award (2018), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2012), Sites ReSeen Grant, New York State Council on the Arts (2006), Fellowship, John Anson Kittredge Foundation (2002), Artist in Residence Grant, California Arts Council (1997, 1996, 1995), Murphy and Cadogan, Fellowship in the Fine Arts, San Francisco Foundation (1987)
Selected exhibitions Guyer has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Petrine, Paris, France; The David Ireland House | 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA; Bibeau Krueger, New York, NY; staircase gallery, San Francisco, CA; odium fati, San Francisco, CA; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; lumber room, Portland, OR; and The Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, New Lebanon, NY and other venues.
Guyer has participated in group shows at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Kiang Malingue, New York, NY; Feature Inc., New York, NY; Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; lumber room, Portland, OR; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia, PA; PLUSkunst, Düsseldorf, Germany and other venues.
Collections Guyer's work is held in permanent collections including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Harvard University Modern Books & Manuscripts Collection, Reed College Art Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, Stanford University Special Collections, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Collaborative projects Léonie Guyer, Paul Kos, and Isabelle Sorrell. Exquisite Mummies. San Francisco, CA: Anglim/Trimble, 2024. Artist intervention and exhibition.
Bill Berkson (poetry) and Léonie Guyer (drawings). Not an Exit. Fairfax, CA: Jungle Garden Press, 2010
Franck André Jamme (poetry) and Léonie Guyer (drawings). Mantra Box. Paris, France: Festina Lente, 2009
Teaching Guyer has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, San José State University and elsewhere. She lives and works in San Francisco.
References
External links
Brooklyn Rail, The New Social Environment, Léonie Guyer in conversation with Dore Bowen. February 28, 2023.