Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce The radiant edge, an exhibition of new paintings by New York artist Heather Guertin. This is Guertin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Los Angeles. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles from February 21 through April 4, with an opening reception on Saturday, February 21 from 5-8pm.

Heather Guertin’s abstractions are unified by conditions of density, compression, and relational shape. Forms extend from edge to edge of her canvases, emphasizing continuity, a fullness of things spreading out like a wild garden or topographical map. Guertin’s gestures remain perpetually in the act of joining—colors, patterns, and textures—together.

Broad passages read as watery plains or fragrant hillsides, while striated marks suggest protective surfaces, layers of rind, skin, or membrane. Veils of white or pastel stippled dots, points, and circles introduce resistance within proliferating fields, slowing the eye and interrupting any reading of the work as pure expressionism. Difference and unharmonious elements fit together with precision, generating a coherent and satisfying dissonance.

Guertin’s use of color is bold, placing complimentary hues in anchoring contrasts. Black against yellow, orange with blue—this creates a push and pull across the surface. While certain colors are allowed to recede or advance, no one area of the canvas functions as background or ground; instead, her forms contour directly against one another. The paintings resist perspectival hierarchy in favor of a saturated field where each zone participates equally in the excess.

Forms bend toward fragment and irregularity. This is the result of Guertin’s pre-painting process, where she assembles compositions through collage studies, which are then translated to graphite drawings, refining line, shape, and texture. She embraces this delicate balance of juxtaposed ‘scraps’ of varied origin, assembled through visible seams into dense ornamental wholes. Individual fragments assert themselves, yet are bound into larger systems of abstract high energy passages, propelling and intensifying the composition through their union.

The heart of Guertin’s practice is perception: what we see and how it all fits together. Forms soften and harden, shed and dissolve, shaped by contact, proximity, and adjacency. Her motifs, rhythms, and colors converge as a generative force, combining into texture and pattern. The paintings in the exhibition intensify through this friction of edges, producing a visible energy as distinct parts meet and are held together without reconciliation. Ultimately what is revealed, is uncompounded pure essence, formed from the accumulation of airy passages, pugnacious and pliable colors, and ornamental vibrating chromatic relationships.