PREVIEW:Jennifer Guidi Waterfall

Light and color pervade every aspect of Jennifer Guidi’s work. The artist’s radiant, mandala-like paintings are marked by tonal and chromatic shifts that operate in concert with richly textured surfaces. The effect echoes natural phenomena and undergirds a powerful archetypal symbolism. Guidi mixes sand into her paints—she uses both oils and acrylics—to produce immersive abstract compositions that borrow from the pared-down structures of Minimalism while evoking ancient theories of energy and perception.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

In her solo exhibition “Waterfall”, Jennifer Guidi constructs a shimmering bridge between the physical topographies of our world and the quiet, expansive contours of the inner self. Drawing equal sustenance from lived geographies and imagined realms, Guidi translates her ongoing meditations on nature into vibrant, pulse-like compositions of color and geometry. By abstracting the elemental structures of the natural world, she envisions a serene convergence of interconnected forces—the slow shift of tectonic time meeting the fleeting illumination of a single moment. Centered within her canvases, a radiant sun or full moon acts as a spiritual locus, casting a pervasive glow over sloping hills, soaring mountain ranges, placid oceans, and cascading waterfalls. “We can all relate to the feeling of being in nature,” Guidi reflects, “walking on the beach, looking at a sunset, and knowing that this world is much larger than we are. I’m trying to gather all of that, take what I can from it, and put it onto canvas.”

Guidi captures the vibrant, kinetic life of the land through a masterclass in chromatic saturation and seamless gradients. Sun-drenched passages of bright pink, violet, fiery orange, and luminous yellow carve out shores and mountainsides, dramatically set against the deep blues and verdant greens of lakes and oceans, or the stark white of rush-hewn water. Much like the physical sand that coats her textured grounds, Guidi builds these expansive fields through painstaking accumulations of individual, rhythmic mark-making. This technique reimagines the formal innovations of late-nineteenth-century Pointillism pioneered by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. By dispersing thousands of colorful, tactile dots across the canvas, Guidi creates a dynamic optical vibration that makes the surface appear to breathe with intrinsic light.

Beyond French Post-Impressionism, Guidi’s practice aligns deeply with the lineage of American mystical abstraction—most notably the Transcendental Painting Group, founded in Taos, New Mexico, in 1938. The collective sought to channel the spiritual energy and stark geological majesty of the Southwestern desert into non-objective visual forms, declaring in their manifesto a desire “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.” Guidi carries a direct geographical and spiritual inheritance from this movement: Agnes Pelton, the group’s sole Californian member, spent three decades living and painting in Cathedral City, just miles from Guidi’s childhood roots in Palm Desert.

Extending this meditative dialogue across media, “Waterfall” also presents a selection of delicate works on paper executed in gouache and watercolor. These companion pieces offer a more fluid, intimate lens into Guidi’s process, capturing the immediate wash of light and water with a spontaneous, breathing grace.

Photo: Jennifer Guidi, Held Between Ocean, Stone and Sky, 2026, Oil and sand on linen, 58 x 76 inches (147.3 x 193 cm), © Jennifer Guidi, Photo: Brica Wilcox, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagossian, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, France, Duration: 3/9-10/10/2026, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30-18:00, https://gagosian.com/