Léonie Guyer makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, prints, and artist books. Her work is characterized by idiosyncratic shapes that are deployed in a variety of spaces. The shapes conflate geometric and organic structures; while specific and individuated, they resist being named. The intimately scaled forms reside in expansive chromatic fields.
Her 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.
Guyer's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; staircase gallery, San Francisco; odium fati, San Francisco; 2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco; Bibeau Krueger, NYC; Feature Inc., NYC; Peter Blum Gallery, NYC; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; lumber room, Portland, OR; The Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, NY; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; PLUSkunst, Düsseldorf, Germany and other venues.
Her work is held in numerous public collections including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reed College Art Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and others.
In 2024 Guyer was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant; Sites ReSeen Grant, New York State Council on the Arts; John Anson Kittredge Foundation Fellowship; California Arts Council Artist in Residence Grant; Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts, San Francisco Foundation.
Léonie Guyer was born in New York, NY. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA, and received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.