France-Lise McGurn’s “The Charm Offensive” Transforms Dundee Contemporary Arts

France-Lise McGurn, a Glasgow-born painter who studied in Dundee, has mounted a new solo show titled The Charm Offensive at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). The exhibition occupies the museum’s expansive galleries, allowing the artist to display paintings, printed archival images, and three-dimensional objects on an unprecedented scale.

The Guardian

The show marks a shift in McGurn’s process: she now prints photographs, magazine ads, family snapshots and other ephemera directly onto canvas before applying paint. Some works feature the printed image almost entirely, while others obscure it beneath layers of pigment, creating “ghost” compositions. A notable large piece, Motor, reproduces a childhood family van and overlays silhouettes of McGurn’s daughter and her late mother, Rita McGurn, who died in 2015, forming a visual meditation on intergenerational legacy.

The Guardian

Beyond the walls, McGurn has relocated a paint-covered sofa from her east-London studio into the gallery, encouraging visitors to sit and linger. Painted wallets and assorted objects populate the space, embodying her mother’s maxim that “anything can be painted on.” The arrangement is intended to make the gallery feel inhabited and personal, inviting guests to treat the environment as an extension of the artwork.

The Guardian

Dynamic, pastel-toned female figures dominate the canvases. While the artist sometimes uses her own body as a reference, she describes the resulting forms as “glyphs” – abstracted symbols rather than literal portraits.

The Guardian

One printed image that sparked attention shows pop star Katy Perry kissing the Earth after a spaceflight, a photograph that went viral for its absurdity. McGurn interprets the picture as a critique of a woman’s impact on the planet when she “goes into space.”

The Guardian

In conversation with the gallery, McGurn explained that her mother’s radical feminist belief—that artists should not wait for a studio but create amid everyday life—continues to shape her practice. McGurn also noted that the pastel palette, while often dismissed as merely “feminine,” derives from the material qualities of her paints and serves to probe the boundary between decoration and depth.

The Guardian

• “She had this radical feminist idea that you don’t wait for the studio,” — Lise McGurn

The Guardian

• “This is an image of a woman coming down and kissing the Earth that, by going into space, she has done something to harm,” — Lise McGurn

The Guardian

“The Charm Offensive” foregrounds the contradictions of contemporary womanhood, using large-scale visual storytelling and immersive gallery design to blur the line between artwork and lived experience. By integrating personal archives with bold, abstracted forms, McGurn challenges conventional hierarchies of subject matter and invites audiences to engage directly with the materiality of painting. The exhibition thus contributes to ongoing dialogues about feminist art practice, the role of nostalgia in creative work, and the potential of museum spaces to become participatory environments.

The Guardian