Galina Munroe: To emerge in a different place

20 August - 6 September 2020

PIERMARQ* is thrilled to welcome back British/French artist Galina Munroe for her second solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Munroe (b. 1993) is a British-French artist who graduated with an MFA from the Central Saint Martins in London. Her practice extends within the parameters of a surreal and abstract world in which shifting shapes and forms illustrate the surface of her canvases. 

This body of work was created in complete social isolation whilst under quarantine at Galina Munroe’s Southern France studio. 

“An intimate alternative universe sprouted from my social confinement this year.

This escapism produced a quirky cast of objects and plants skirting around on surreal and silent planes of brashly put together emotive colour fields. Wonky shapes join recurring circles, spreading out to suggest anything from flowers to wheels to chicken heads and towers, the repetitive shapes and marks continuously shift between canvases, playing between abstraction and a laisser-faire kind of figuration. There are clues of a distanced reality- Scenes appear, flowers have been arranged, time flickers, things wilt, but the interplay of deceptively simplified shapes along with aloof and varied titles lure us in to a different place, insisting we compose our own unfettered narratives running parallel to the strange personification of objects and flora, beckoning us down a trail of otherworldly ambiguity. Some of the quirks appear to be lost in their own world, unaware of us peering in, whilst others call out to our voyeuristic tendencies as we leer and engage with them.

The black and white dock of the mundane still-life echoes not far off, but there is an urgency for abstraction and humour here. A sure attempt of escaping the confrontational boredom of confined life.”


Galina Munroe