Magalie Guérin: a hand a hand

Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present a hand a hand, a solo exhibition of paintings and ceramic sculptures by Magalie Guérin. On view from September 10 through October 24th, 2026, a hand a hand marks the artist’s second solo presentation at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins and the first time her paintings and ceramic sculptures are presented together in the United States. A public opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, September 10, from 6–8pm.

The title of the exhibition, a hand a hand, is derived from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a text in which language becomes object-like: tactile, cadenced, and stubbornly physical. Words are handled rather than explained. They are turned over, repeated, nudged into new relationships. Meaning arrives sideways. Like Stein’s writing, Guérin’s work opens a space where recognition is slippery.

For Guérin, making is a process of discovery rather than description. Though developed through different processes and materials, the two bodies of work share a common language and an ongoing dialogue. The paintings evolve through a sequence of revisions, hesitations, and returns, while her sculptures take shape through stacking, balancing, and improvisation. Areas of rich color, raised edges, palpable textures, and amorphous shapes reappear throughout both mediums, as though testing their possibilities through different states of being.

In one of the largest paintings Guérin has done to date, we witness an ongoing negotiation between figure and ground. Swaths of tea green set the stage for a chartreuse limb-like form that inserts itself into a tectonic, striated field. In one of the ceramic sculptures, a black and white gridded form suggests a fishtail, or a quotation mark balancing playfully, threatening to swoop down. In both mediums, the artist’s hand reveals itself through scribbles, scrapes and impastoed surfaces.

The works in a hand a hand resist definitive interpretation while remaining insistently present. They gather associations and visual rhymes, and propose that we navigate by intuition, memory, and sensation. Across painting and sculpture, Guérin’s works are segmented yet remain surprisingly resolved. In 2023, John Yau wrote “Guérin depicts a world of gravity and space occupied by shapes that are both specific and unknown.” This assertive ambiguity is foundational to the work of Magalie Guérin, and it asks us to consider alternatives to naming what we see, in her work and beyond.