Art Basel Feature: Tina Girouard

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a focused survey of artworks by American artist Tina Girouard (1946-2020). The selection draws from works made during the 1970s including Sky Above, Earth Below (1974), major works from Walls Wallpaper and Test Pattern drawing series, along with a selection of performance documentation, highlighting works the Girouard created in Europe during this period. This presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe since 1984 and a return to Basel since Holly Solomon Gallery presented her work there in 1977.

Sky Above, Earth Below comprises four bands of ‘Solomon’s Lot’ fabrics suspended across the ceiling and four cut sheets of patterned linoleum flooring arranged below it on the ground. Engaging minimalist concerns with materiality, volume, and perception, Girouard delineated a cube within the exhibition space. However, her use of domestic materials—airy, floral fabrics and decorative home flooring—also links the installation to experiments in post-minimalism and provisional architecture. The work echoes the wall-bound arrangements in the booth that also address the domicile as a subject.

Girouard grew up on a farm in Louisiana “between De Quincy and Lake Charles […] a place that has no name.” Her work can be situated in a similar nonplace, permeating several art historical movements. Girouard’s practice is connected to the post-minimalists and is also deeply associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in New York. Intertwined with feminist art history, are Girouard’s considerations of domestic space and the “women’s work” such as washing, cooking, sewing, and sweeping, that has become indicative of her practice. Reworking art into something increasingly unpredictable and uncategorizable, ever close to life itself, Girouard exploits the porousness of her materials and conceptual classifications. 

Though Girouard is best known for her use of found patterns from mass-produced materials, she was also interested in drawing patterns of her own. These drawings, divided into quadrants, were called her ‘test patterns.’ Abutted at the edges and corners, the works test the relationships of different colors, shapes, and lines as they meet. Small, like quotations or excerpts, they point to the artist’s desire to use symbolic gestures to make statements about people, places, and energy. 

As an important member of the SoHo art scene, Girouard was a founding participant of 112 Greene Street Gallery, The Anarchitecture Group, Clocktower Gallery (now MoMA PS1), the artist-run FOOD restaurant with collaborators Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden, Holly Solomon Gallery, Creative Time, and The Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. In addition to her own projects, Girouard was involved in films, videos, and performances by her artist peers including Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Holt, Laurie Anderson, and the Natural History of the American Dancer, among others.

Girouard’s participation in and influence on the SoHo art scene of the 1970s represents an elusive social energy of the period—marked by the spirit of collaboration, and a willingness and commitment to dispense with limitations: aesthetic, conceptual, and political. She countered the austere minimalist art being made at the time with exuberant color, eclectic compositions, and unorthodox materials. Eschewing any kind of media specificity in her performances, videos, paintings, and installation pieces, Girouard’s work incorporates anything from silk fabrics, tapestries, wallpapers, to rolls of linoleum and pressed tin tiles. Her work is as varied as her imagination. Her ideas about the potential of art and life making are charming and accessible, ordinary and profound, revealing the genius and magic of her mind.

Girouard’s first comprehensive retrospective SIGN-IN is currently on view at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City through September 14, 2025. The retrospective debuted at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans in 2024, and subsequently travelled to the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) in New York last fall. The travelling exhibition is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive and Artistic Director of CARA, together with Andrea Andersson, Rivers Founding Director and Chief Curator, and with Jordan Amirkhani, Rivers Curator. A forthcoming book of unpublished images, artist ephemera, and archival materials will be published in October 2025 by Dancing Foxes in collaboration with Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought.

Girouard mounted performances and installations across Europe including international art events such as Documenta V and VI, Kassel, DE; 10th Paris Biennale, Paris, FR; International Performance Festival, Landhaushof, Graz, AT; and the Venice Biennale in 1980. Between 1976 – 1982 she performed at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, FR; The Orangerie, Kassel, DE; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, BE; Zagreb, Croatia (former Yugoslavia); and De Vleeshal, Middleberg, NL. 

Girouard had a 1983 mid-career survey mounted at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and has exhibited widely at museums and institutions including Stedelijk Museum, Gent, BE; Mumok, Vienna, AT; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, NY; ICA Miami, FL; ICA Philadelphia, PA; Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, DE; Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, BE; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; and the Kitchen, NY; among others.

Girouard’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Ludwig Forum fur International Kunst Aachen, DE; Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico; and Stedelijk Museum Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium.

Since 2019, the artist Estate of Tina Girouard has been represented by Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. The gallery presented an historic restaging of one of her important performances Pinwheel (1977) in curatorial partnership with Lumi Tan and The Kitchen, NYC for the inaugural Meridians sector at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. The following February in 2020 the gallery presented the first solo exhibition of Girouard’s work in Los Angeles, the last presentation of her work prior to her passing. In fall 2024, Anat Ebgi presented I want you to have a good time, a solo exhibition centered around the re-performance of Girouard’s Sound Loop from her Time and Distance series (1970), an examination of the artist’s use of layering, seriality, language, and performance as an approach to world building.