Monique van genderen biography wife

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Monique van genderen ucsd

Monique van Genderen creates large-scale wall paintings that make use of adhesive vinyl with various reflective, translucent, and matte finishes. Solid architectural surfaces are transformed into changeable spaces through the play of light on the materials, which shift, disappear, and reappear as one passes by. Inspired by the tradition of abstract painting as well as contemporary graphic design and computer generated patterns, van Genderen's work challenges the expectations of painting.

In van Genderen was awarded a Chinati Foundation artist's residency. Constructed from torn and collaged vinyl, her early works make reference to a history of high modernist abstraction, even as their materials are remnants from her job as a maker of commercial signs. In this layering of signification, from wall to sign to paint and back again, the artist engages the structures of the art world without becoming mired in mere conceptual asides.

In recent years, she has expanded her range of materials to include enamel and watercolor, among others, and the slippages continue—between one material and another, between work and context, between one visual moment and the next. A recent exhibition, My Watercolor Story , included three panels in which van Genderen transforms the hard-edge enamel of sign paint into a variety of visual surfaces.

In The Bather distinct layers of blue and green produce a play of light and shadow that mimics her vinyl collages. Each work maintains its abstract nature, yet the materials themselves take on a representational quality—one thing for another. Layers of enamel refer to watercolor like layers of vinyl refer to paint. While this experience begins in the visual, it resonates out into the contexts of her practice.

My Watercolor Story also contained a long singular walnut shelf onto which van Genderen placed bound volumes of delicate watercolors, page after page.