Cindy Phenix (b. 1989) is a Canadian painter based in Los Angeles and a 2015 finalist of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. She has had solo shows at Nino Mier Gallery and Victoria Miro, and her work is held by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Her narrative paintings merge abstraction and figuration, filling kaleidoscopic surfaces with fragmented figures and gender-ambiguous monsters that embody power and freedom.
Cindy Phenix (b. 1989, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 2016 and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 2020. In 2015 she was named one of the fifteen finalists of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and she has held residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, ACRE and the Vermont Studio Center. Her narrative paintings combine abstraction and figuration: fragmented figures and gender-ambiguous, monstrous creatures inhabit flat, kaleidoscopic surfaces, becoming figures of power and personal freedom. She works with oil, acrylic, pastel, coloured pencil and collage, and in some series paints directly on drywall and wood. Phenix has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles and Brussels, Victoria Miro in the UK, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal and the Maison de la culture de Longueuil. Her work is held in collections including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. Her 2020 exhibition “Particles of Abnormality” at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, made during self-isolation, reflected on community, displacement and escapism and included a series of drywall works depicting individual monsters with mutable bodies undefined by gender. The work “New Kind of Lucidity” (2020), offered by TUMO Gallery, belongs to this series: it is executed in oil, acrylic, pastel, colour pencil and paper on drywall, measures 244.5 × 122 cm and was shown in “Particles of Abnormality”.
