Bernier/Eliades Gallery

Monique van Genderen (b.1965, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) received her Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA. Monique van Genderen is preoccupied with surface quality and colour, creating varying levels of reflection and transparency in her work through the use of various types of paint.

She engages with materiality, surface, and the language of modernist abstraction in a diverse range of paintings and wall installations. Her artworks features flat planes and patches of colour (sometimes painted over other hues to create radiant, glimmering, translucent layers) with smaller delicate lines crossing and countering these robust blockier elements. Gestural brush marks, ranging from calligraphy to singular minimalist strokes. In her early artworks, using ripped and cut Adhesive Vinyl she subverted the material norms of painting. The artist continues to experiment, using, for example, egg tempera,wax on paper, or glazes on clay.

She encompassed and surpassed human height with a set of large-scale wall paintings. As van Genderen explains: “As a painter raised in California the influence of the land and water on the colour and light in my painting is dominant. There is also a tug between Northern California and Southern California, I am from Southern California and represent the harder light. From Los Angeles I represent experimentation with new materials entrepreneurism. Northern California has more fog and moisture which diffuses and darkens the light. You see this out of the windows. The frontier spirit of California has influenced myself and many abstract painters that I revere.