France-Lise McGurn: The Charm Offensive
We're delighted to present The Charm Offensive, a major new exhibition by Scottish artist France-Lise McGurn and her most significant presentation in a UK institution to date. Filling both galleries at DCA, the exhibition brings together paintings alongside drawing, furniture, objects and ephemera from McGurn’s studio. Having studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), the exhibition marks McGurn’s return to the formative city of Dundee, and a distinct evolution in her practice.
In The Charm Offensive, McGurn’s paintings spill from the canvas to walls, creating a site-specific installation where paintings created in the studio have a new life. Her wall paintings make ‘new’ of works already made – recontextualising them in the gallery space. She assembles varied images and exiled objects from the studio and city in constellations - implying location, time or feeling, and creating a sense of immediacy. This new development in her work is made possible by the scale of DCA galleries and the accompanying events programme, including her Artist's Choice Screenings, films selected by McGurn to expand on and complement the exhibition.
The title of the show comes from a quip my mum made towards someone shouting in a fit of road rage. There’s also a big, printed image of a car we had growing up in the show. I think it’s about a few things… movement, machines, cars as people, grief. It’s a deeply personal and layered title that reflects my own approach to painting, whilst referencing a kind of subversive account of eros and the laws of attraction. There’s something to be said about wit - being quick and responsive as a way of making paintings to keep on moving. Maybe for me “the charm offensive” is also in part about charisma, beauty and being offensive - all of which relates to the job of making paintings.France-Lise McGurn
Butting print against paint, paper against “leather n lino” - the textures of domestic and city life form a landscape for interpreting the contemporary experience. Printed collages are created as the artist paints directly onto materials she has lived with over time, rewatched, replayed or had an attachment to.
The cycle of homage, destruction and creation becomes a new area of work; lines that spill from canvases on the wall now spray like graffiti onto magazines, tv sets or the family car. The friction between the stillness of the printed image and the motion of oil paint and pixels shifts the rhythm, even in works that McGurn describes as “straight-up oil on canvas”.
Female forms are “part self-portrait, part observation, part memory”. Scribed onto any available surface, they propose both sexual expression and a subversive reading of the body as a sexual, and sexualised, object. Contemplating states of ecstasy and censorship, these figures span a range of shifting archetypes, reflecting states of isolation and both carnal and commercial desire: part charm, part offensive.
McGurn’s work captures the darkly comic charge of contemporary urban life in ways that feel both deeply personal and broadly resonant. Balancing immediacy with emotional depth, the installation evokes lived experience while interrogating how desire is constructed, constrained and performed. Through layered imagery and painterly gesture, the exhibition reflects on the ways identity and longing are mediated through popular culture, memory and nostalgia, inviting viewers to construct narratives of their own.
About France-Lise McGurn
France-Lise McGurn was born 1983, in Glasgow. She lives and works between London and Glasgow. She studied for her BA at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 2005, her MA in London at the Royal College of Art, London and her MA in painting Exchange at Hunter College of Art, New York in 2012.
McGurn predominantly works with painting to create layered installations that incorporate the gallery walls, floors and ceilings. Her calligraphic brushstrokes are made intuitively and swiftly, prioritising rhythm and movement which convey a relationship to themes of intimacy, ecstasy and memory.
She works indirectly from a collected archive of imagery which forms the shapes, lines and shorthand that spill across canvases and surfaces. These collected materials form the body of her own research and include celebrity autographs, classical sculpture, photography, women’s magazines, 70s film, advertisements, flyers, figurines, found objects and furniture.
Selected solo exhibitions include: DEE-TOUR, MASSIMODECARLO, Domus Haus, Basel (2026); Bad TV, Strawberry, MASSIMODECARLO, London (2024); What Everyone Wants, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2024); Studio Voltaire, London (2023); Aloud, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museums, Glasgow (2022); In Emotia, Tramway, Glasgow (2020); Bodytronic, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel (2020) and Sleepless, Tate Britain, London (2019). She will have a two-year commission at the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia, US, in 2027.
"I Only Have Apple Juice…", a group exhibition co-curated by France-Lise McGurn and John Douglas Miller, was on view at Bonny Don't Live at Home, Glasgow in June 2026.
France-Lise McGurn is represented by MASSIMODECARLO, London and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.