Scottish artist France-Lise McGurn is presenting The Charm Offensive, a new exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts that marks a significant scale-up in her painting practice and represents something of a homecoming, since she studied painting in the city and once lived three doors from the gallery. The show explores grief, the passage of time and the complexities of modern womanhood, and is notable for making visible the archive of source material – film stills, magazine adverts and family photographs – that has always underpinned her work but was previously kept hidden beneath layers of paint.

For this exhibition, McGurn has had found images printed directly onto canvas, sometimes obscuring them entirely with paint and elsewhere letting them dominate the composition, creating a lo-fi, retro effect. A standout piece, Motor, features an image of her family's childhood van overlaid with painted silhouettes of her young daughter and her late mother, the artist Rita McGurn, who died in 2015 and whose ethos of painting anywhere, on anything, continues to shape her daughter's approach. The show also incorporates real objects from McGurn's studio, including a paint-covered sofa, inviting visitors to linger in the space rather than simply view the work.