France-Lise McGurn

France-Lise McGurn was born in 1983 in Glasgow, Scotland, and lives and works between Glasgow and London. She earned a BA in Fine Art Painting from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee in 2005, and that year also received the John Kinross Scholarship from the Royal Scottish Academy, which supported a period of study in Florence, Italy. In 2012 she completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London, including an exchange period at Hunter College of Art in New York.

McGurn's paintings layer loosely rendered, often fragmented figures directly onto canvas, wall, and architectural surface, drawing on club culture, advertising, and the visual rhythm of city life. She has extended the practice into large-scale murals and site-specific installation, most visibly in Aloud, a 2021 commission for Glasgow International staged at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Her exhibition history includes solo presentations at Kunsthaus Pasquart in Biel (2020), Studio Voltaire in London (2023), and The Modern Institute in Glasgow (2024). In 2019 she was the subject of Art Now: Sleepless, a solo commission at Tate Britain. She is currently represented by MASSIMODECARLO and by The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Forthcoming 2026 projects include DEE-TOUR, a solo exhibition with MASSIMODECARLO opening in August 2026, and an exhibition expected at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland, whose title had not been announced in public sources as of this writing.

Institutional recognition of McGurn has centered on her ability to translate the loose, unfinished energy of drawing into large, immersive paintings and murals. Tate Britain's selection of her for its Art Now program in 2019, staged in the Duveen Galleries, placed her among a small group of younger artists given that platform, and her subsequent commission for Glasgow International at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum extended that institutional interest to a major civic museum in her home city. Gallery and museum texts consistently describe her work through the vocabulary of the body in motion, nightlife, and the city, with her surfaces treated as records of overlapping, half-remembered figures rather than fixed portraits. No verbatim critical quotation attributed to a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed from available sources, so none is reproduced here.

McGurn's auction market is small and still developing relative to her institutional profile. Her highest recorded auction price is GBP 87,500 for the painting Goya Eyes, sold at Christie's in London in October 2021; the exact day of sale is not confirmed in public auction summaries, though the price and venue are corroborated by multiple market-tracking sources. Other recorded results sit well below that figure, including USD 40,640 for Agalmatophilia and HKD 88,900 for Stay at Home, both at Phillips, indicating a market where individual results vary widely by work, venue, and moment rather than tracing a steady upward line. Market trackers name annual top lots in subsequent years, including Sin and Syncope in 2023 (HKD 609,600 at Phillips Hong Kong) and Rebel in 2024 (HKD 352,800 at Christie's Hong Kong), both below the 2021 record; a 2025 top lot, White Wine, is named by MutualArt without a published price, so it cannot be confirmed against the Goya Eyes record.

McGurn's secondary market is thin, with a limited number of tracked auction results and considerable variance between the highest recorded price and more typical outcomes at Phillips. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so authentication and provenance are best handled directly through her current galleries, MASSIMODECARLO and The Modern Institute. Her exact birth date has not been documented in public sources beyond the year 1983, and collectors should treat any single auction result as an individual data point rather than as evidence of an established price trend.