France-Lise McGurn (born 1983 in Glasgow) studied fine art at Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, graduating in 2005. That same year, the Royal Scottish Academy awarded her the John Kinross Scholarship, funding a period in Florence immersed in Italian Renaissance painting — an unlikely formative influence for an artist now associated with nightlife, pop culture, and unguarded intimacy. Jacopo Pontormo's Mannerist altarpiece Deposition from the Cross (1528), seen during that stay, later resurfaced directly in her large-scale 2020 work Bachelorette. She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London in 2012, with an exchange at Hunter College in New York.

McGurn works from what she calls a personal archive — film stills, fetish magazines, Botticelli reproductions, celebrity autographs — sketched and absorbed until the source material dissolves into a private visual shorthand. The resulting figures are drawn intuitively, in swift calligraphic strokes, rather than copied or appropriated directly. "My physical body's in the paintings because it's what I have at hand," she has said. "Everything in my work is like an amalgamation of all the stuff that I'm interested in."

Her paintings routinely exceed their own canvases, extending onto gallery walls, floors, and furniture to create fully immersive installations — a refusal, consistent across her career, to let painting stay safely bounded. She has been direct about the recurring female nude in her work: "You see lots of naked women in my paintings, and you also see lots of naked women in the streets — in the billboards, in the magazines that we look at. If the world were filled with half-naked men, there'd be a lot more men in my paintings." She divides her time between London and Glasgow.

Sleepless (2019), her site-specific installation for Tate Britain's Art Now series, transformed the gallery walls into an extension of the canvas — figures drawn directly onto the architecture of the museum itself, evoking the intimacy and disorientation of a sleepless city night.

Bachelorette (2020), a large-scale painting completed during the first COVID-19 lockdown, drew directly on Pontormo's sixteenth-century Deposition from the Cross — filtering a Mannerist altarpiece through McGurn's own vocabulary of loosely rendered, overlapping bodies, developed through a process of layering, erasing, and reworking rather than fixed composition.

Goya Eyes, McGurn's auction record at $120,034 (Christie's London, 2021), exemplifies her mature style: swift, economical mark-making that suggests a figure without ever fully resolving it.

McGurn's prints extend the same intuitive, unresolved quality that defines her paintings and installations — editions are frequently hand-finished with additional paint, meaning no two impressions are quite identical, and the line between "edition" and "unique work" stays deliberately blurred. This is consistent with her broader practice: even her large-scale gallery installations resist fixed, final compositions, built instead through layering and reworking.

Her print subjects draw from the same archive of film stills, fashion imagery, and remembered nights that populate her paintings — screenprints and monoprints in which the swift, calligraphic line central to her practice translates directly onto paper, with almost none of the immediacy lost between mediums.

For collectors, McGurn's editions offer access to an artist whose work already sits in major public collections including Tate, the Hill Art Foundation, and the Kunsthaus-Sammlung Pasquart in Biel — a figurative practice building serious institutional momentum at a genuinely accessible entry point.