About the publication
We are delighted to publish a new book, The Charm Offensive: France-Lise McGurn, to accompany McGurn’s solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2026.
The Charm Offensive is McGurn’s most significant UK exhibition to date, with which she has created a full-scale takeover of DCA’s expansive galleries. It also marks an evolution in her visual language: in this new body of work, she has assembled paintings, drawings, furniture, digital collages and ephemera from her studio into a series of interconnected, staged constellations. Paintings spill from canvases and collages, over furniture, domestic objects and the floor, creating an intricate network of intersecting images, references, bodies and objects that revel in the paradoxes of contemporary life. Resisting meaning for intuition, sensation and experience, McGurn brings all these elements together to evoke different places, times and emotional states.
This softcover book richly documents this new body of work with photographs of the exhibition and some individual works. Alongside an introduction by DCA’s Head of Exhibitions Dan Brown and a preface by DCA’s Director Beth Bate, the book features new text by curator and writer John Douglas Millar. Sharing a Dundee connection with McGurn, Millar’s diaristic essay evokes the living, the dying, the dancing and the traces of bodies that can be glimpsed throughout McGurn’s work.
| Date | November 2026 |
| Edition of | 400 |
| Design | Valerie Norris |
| Edited by | Dan Brown |
| ISBN | 978-1-0668105-0-5 |
| Dimensions | 24 x 21cm |
| Pages | 72pp |
About the artist
France-Lise McGurn was born 1983, in Glasgow. She lives and works between London and Glasgow. She studied for her BA at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 2005, her MA in London at the Royal College of Art, London and her MA in painting Exchange at Hunter College of Art, New York in 2012.
France-Lise McGurn is represented by MASSIMODECARLO, London and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.
About the writer
John Douglas Millar is a Scottish writer based in London. He is currently working on a biography of the photographer Peter Hujar to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, and Norton/Liveright in the US in 2030. In 2025 he co-curated the exhibition Peter Hujar: Eyes Open In The Dark with Gary Schneider at London’s Raven Row Gallery (travelling to the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, February 2026).
In summer 2026 he co-curated the exhibition I Only Have Apple Juice at Bonny Don’t live at Home, Glasgow, with France-Lise McGurn.
He has also curated an exhibition of the painter Paul Becker’s work, « FURTHER READING », showing at Sans Titre, Paris, in September 2026.
