Francine Hunter McGivern

For the last 50 years, Francine Hunter McGivern’s work embraces a range of ideas grounded in a Post-Conceptual practice that includes performance, video, text, multi-media installations, drawing, painting, and sculpture.

In 1989, in the wake of profound personal losses due to the AIDS epidemic, Hunter McGivern closed Jungle Red Studios (1977–1988) in New York City, and moved to Italy. While living in Positano through 1997, the artist became inspired by life on the Amalfi Coast. She experienced a deep transformation amidst the powerful volcanic energy fields. She stopped performing and began to develop a varied and unique vocabulary for creating and framing spaces emerging from ideas referenced in her lifelong study of the hermetic and metaphysics. Through the use of various textural materials, she began to create works in “series” for installation. This process has evolved into her present practice.

Diagnosed with epilepsy at age six, Hunter McGivern began counting interior grids and geometric forms as a simple methodic exercise to perceive and map spatial delineation, thus locating and re-entering her physical form in the spaces between. These out-of-body seizures were the roots of her conscious creative development and have guided her lifelong research into art, philosophy, metaphysics, geometry, and numerology, as germinating ciphers that continue to determine and shape the artist’s practice and process.

The title of the exhibition Intent references Hunter McGivern’s awareness that Intent is synchronous with cause and effect in Buddhist philosophy. Intention organizes different parts of the mind to carry out a desired action. The paintings and sculptural works on view are from two bodies of work created in 2023: Immanence and Holey Tondos. The works demonstrate Hunter McGivern’s visual circumambulation of “actions” expressed within various series of anthropomorphic and architectural geometric drawings and paintings created over the past four years. “As a multi-disciplinary artist, my intent is to expand consciousness and the inherent expression of ideas through practice, process, form, and archive.”