Jennifer Guidi (born 1972) is an American painter.

Early life and education

Guidi was raised throughout Southern California, as her family moved between Manhattan Beach and Orange County prior to settling in Palm Desert. Although neither of her parents had a background in visual art, she showed an early interest and began taking art classes in a local storefront, deciding by her freshman year of high school that she wanted to attend art school. Guidi enrolled at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with ...

, where she received a formal education in painting and printmaking that privileged traditional techniques and representations of the human body. As a result, Guidi primarily painted portraits, both of herself and of friends. After receiving her BFA in 1994, Guidi earned an MFA from the

School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew into the museum and ...

in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles in 2001.Gebremedhin, Thomas, “Different Strokes,” WSJ, Art Talk, September 2017, pp.136-137. Retrieved March 7, 2018Rus, Mayer, “Get into the Groove,” Architectural Digest, April 2017, pp. 72-75. Retrieved March 7, 2018

Career

In 2005, she staged her first solo exhibition at ACME. in Los Angeles, where she presented eleven intimately-scaled oil paintings on linen that drew comparisons to the paintings of Sam Francis and Fairfield Porter. At this time, Guidi was making representational paintings of landscapes, plants, and insects.Visible Light, published by Mousse Publishing, Milan, and Mueso d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce,

Genoa Genoa ( ; it, Genova ; lij, Zêna ). is the capital of the Italian region of Liguria and the sixth-largest city in Italy. In 2015, 594,733 people lived within the city's administrative limits. As of the 2011 Italian census, the Province of ...

, 2017. During a 2012 trip to Marrakech, she became fascinated by the rich patterning of Moroccan rugs, specifically the intricate stitching found on their rarely seen verso sides. She then began to paint from photographs of these woven surfaces, ultimately producing a series of abstract oil and sand paintings titled ''Field Paintings'', which debuted in a solo exhibition at LAXART in 2014. Featuring rows of minuscule, tactile impressions, these paintings marked a shift from representation to abstraction, as well as the introduction of sand into Guidi's work. In 2017, Guidi presented her first solo museum exhibition at the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in

, Italy. The exhibition consisted of large-scale sand and acrylic paintings, which were painted in the seven colors of the light spectrum and occupied the frescoed interior walls of the neoclassical Italian villa. Methodically-produced meditations on light and color, Guidi's most recent paintings feature mandala-like compositions and have been compared to the works of

Agnes Martin Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004), was an American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence". Although she is often considered or referred to as a minimalist, Mart ...

Georgia O'Keeffe Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been called the "Mother of Ame ...

, and the

Light and Space Light and Space denotes a loosely affiliated art movement related to op art, minimalism and geometric abstraction originating in Southern California in the 1960s and influenced by John McLaughlin. It is characterized by a focus on perceptual ph ...

artists. Guidi's work can be found in the public collections of the Hammer Museum,

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

, Marciano Art Foundation, and the Rubell Family Collection.

Museum exhibitions

* 2017: “Visible Light / Luce Visible,” Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Guidi, Jennifer 1972 births Living people 21st-century American painters 21st-century American women artists American women painters American people of Italian descent Boston University College of Fine Arts alumni School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni