At a moment when figurative art is enjoying something of a renaissance, Whitney McVeigh has produced a series of works that combine the expressive immediacy of gestural abstraction with the psychological depth of portraiture. The ‘Heads’ paintings are mainly executed in acrylic inks on paper or canvas and are not portraits in the conventional sense, but adopt certain formal aspects of portraiture merely as a starting point for a more inventive take on human individuality.

McVeigh’s fluid means of applying paint to the picture surface suggests a degree of technical ‘looseness’ which actually disguises the control exercised in the production of…

At a moment when figurative art is enjoying something of a renaissance, Whitney McVeigh has produced a series of works that combine the expressive immediacy of gestural abstraction with the psychological depth of portraiture. The ‘Heads’ paintings are mainly executed in acrylic inks on paper or canvas and are not portraits in the conventional sense, but adopt certain formal aspects of portraiture merely as a starting point for a more inventive take on human individuality.

McVeigh’s fluid means of applying paint to the picture surface suggests a degree of technical ‘looseness’ which actually disguises the control exercised in the production of the image. In this respect her work recalls the approach of Jean Dubuffet and certain aspects of the ‘Art Brut’ movement, which privileged an unfettered, ‘child-like’ approach to creativity as a route into more authentic image-making unconstrained by convention.

McVeigh has spoken of her interest in what she calls “the internal landscape: our make-up,“seeing her ‘Heads’ as representative of “a frailty beneath the complex surface of us all.” Like the sculpted heads of Elisabeth Frink, McVeigh’s ‘Heads’ paintings allude to the tension between universal human frailty and the totemic qualities of the human image that are central to ancient and ‘primitive’ art.

Whitney McVeigh was born in New York in 1968 and moved to the UK in 1976 where she studied at Edinburgh College of Art. She has since exhibited in both solo and group shows in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London and has work, including portrait commissions, in private collections worldwide. She has recently showed at Broadway Gallery in New York and in London’s Shoreditch. She now lives and works in London.