Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Juanita Guccione: A Divine Gamble, an exhibition of 18 paintings largely produced in the 1940s. Guccione’s output defied categorization, spanning Cubism, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstraction, and the many unnamed styles that form at their intersections. The grouping of paintings that comprise A Divine Gamble are unified by Guccione’s sensitive and singular approach, complicating our understanding of Surrealist iconography and style.
Juanita Guccione (1904–1999) was an artist whose adolescence and young adulthood were filled with an unimaginable amount of change on both global and personal scales. Guccione came of age in the Northeast United States in the shadow of the first World War, later traveling to France, Greece, and Italy during the Interwar period. As a young adult, Guccione joined an artists’ colony in northeastern Algeria, where she later bore a son. Upon returning to the States, Guccione collaborated with European exiles such as Giorgio de Chirico and Arshile Gorky; studied under the tutelage of Hans Hoffman; and created murals through the Works Progress Administration. While the world went to war once again, Guccione mourned the death of her sister Dorothy and married her beloved husband Dominick J. Guccione.
By the 1940s, Guccione had been steeped in both adventure and violence; love and tragedy; scholarship and intuition. Her paintings from this period address uncertainty through Surrealism, allowing the irrational juxtaposition of objects to express a variety of conflicting truths in a single picture. Disembodied limbs and familiar art historical tropes as seen in Lessons from the Rose suggest a dreamlike memory of prewar Europe, a misty forest of cigarettes between painted fingernails and beauty at the edge of decadence. War Gadgets imagines the implements of an unseen violence, understood only through the death-laden news reports of the war overseas.
The artworks presented in A Divine Gamble vary greatly in their compositions; some focus on figures, while others explore architecture or arrangements of objects. Overlaid over each composition, however, are recurring evocations of chance, fate, randomness, and the ways in which they combine. Guccione’s decadeplus deep-dive into Surrealism could be viewed as her way of making sense of the enormous forces that acted upon her but remained so firmly out of her control.
Following the death of Dominick Guccione in 1959, Juanita Guccione never again showed her earlier works, and her output became increasingly abstract. While the majority of her work from 1950 to 1990 was entirely devoid of the human figure, in the final years of her life, Guccione returned to a style resembles her work from the 1940s. Don’t Be So Sure, II, as the singular work from the 1990s amidst this grouping of paintings, illustrates Guccione’s return to the mode through which she was able to process and understand a rapidly changing world that may have felt, at times, like A Divine Gamble.
Lincoln Glenn’s exhibition will run January 30th – March 15th, 2025 at 542 West 24th Street and the gallery space will be open to visitors from 10 am – 6 pm Tuesday – Saturday. A catalogue essay by Susan L. Aberth will accompany the exhibition
