Monique van Genderen | Paintings

Quint Gallery is thrilled to present Paintings by Monique van Genderen, an artist who has been working in the expanded field of painting through the lens of Los Angeles since the early 2000’s. There will be an opening reception with the artist on June 10 from 6-8 PM.

B Side, painted in van Genderen’s San Diego studio and completed in 2021, spans 35 of the 48 feet that make up one gallery wall. It was originally exhibited along A Side, a painting of equal dimension and created over the course of the same two-year period. Developed in a feedback loop with one another, these works and others that characterize her practice were made with repetition in mind, related to philosophies about memory and an attempt to catalog the image and understand it as language.

Van Genderen then began a series of "afterimage" or "snapshot" paintings, near-exact replications which reverberate from areas of the larger works. The afterimage is an ocular phenomenon where an image lingers in the viewer’s sight even when the viewer has looked away. Now, two years later, she expands upon the afterimage of B-Side with a set of new paintings made for the exhibition and from the periphery of her own abstracted memory. For the viewer, this method invites them to focus beyond the spectacle of the monumental work and engage with the details, imprinted with the artist’s hand guiding an oil stick over an untreated canvas. Her painterly language may be understood through her search to humanize abstraction, in which intersections of landscapes and organic forms convey memories and evolve over time. Each work communicates the process of painting itself, using the canvas to create a sense of expansiveness, depth, and movement.

Monique van Genderen was born in Vancouver, Canada and raised in Huntington Beach, CA. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego. She is the recipient of a Project Commission for Murals for La Jolla; 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. In 2006, van Genderen participated in Art Unlimited, Art Basel 37, curated by Samuel Keller, and in 2004, was an Artist in Residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. She is currently on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD and lives and works in La Jolla and Los Angeles.