Zoe McGuire

Born in 1996 in Albany, NY
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Zoe McGuire’s work is comprised of vibrant oil paintings and charcoal and pastel drawings. She examines and builds visual connections to phenomena that are difficult to see. In her paintings, McGuire explores the intertwined lives of plants, animals, and fungi with ecosystems, highlighting the symbiosis, care, and social aspects of each forest entity. With a background in art history, McGuire explores the transdisciplinary approach to painting, bringing together a myriad of influences. She relies on her intuition and creates landscapes of a suspended and non-specific time. The scientific and spiritual, historical and contemporary, find themselves in dialogue. The past is present, and the present moves and flows between tenses. Using oil paint on canvas and pastel on paper, McGuire fuses the visual patterning of Art Nouveau’s sinuous forms, the sublime wonder and peril of Hudson River School painting, and the spiritually oriented abstraction of the Transcendental Painting Group. 

McGuire received her Bachelor of Arts in 2018 from Skidmore College, where she studied art history, and Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Fine Art in 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include Earthshine, Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Cambium, Gaa Gallery, New York, NY; Sacred Ecologies, Another Gallery, New York, NY; and a solo booth at Intersect Palm Springs, Gaa Gallery, Palm Springs, CA. McGuire’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Taymour Grahne Projects, and Moosey Art in London, UK; Kutlesa Gallery, Goldau, Switzerland; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong; Marinaro, Monica King Contemporary, Deanna Evans, and Vanderplas Gallery, in New York, NY; Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA, among others. McGuire was a finalist for the New American Painting’s Emerging Artist Grant and was featured in their 2022 MFA print issue.