Overview
I'm interested in colour and how it is attached to memory. The ways in which it can both forge and summon an environment. When I see a colour that makes a strong impression on me, I try and commit it to memory, and this always relates to a place and to a story. — Megan Rooney
An enigmatic storyteller, Megan Rooney works across a variety of media – including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and language – to develop interwoven narratives. The body has a sustained presence in her work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her practice. The subjects of her works are drawn directly from her own life and surroundings, while her references are deeply invested in the present moment. She addresses the myriad effects of politics and social conventions that manifest in the home and on the female body. Recurring characters and motifs form part of a dreamlike narrative that is never fixed, but obliquely references some of the most urgent issues of our time.
Painting on uniform canvases measuring 200 x 150 cm – the wingspan of the average woman – Rooney presents layers of ethereal forms, often sanded back and painted over multiple times to create abstracted narratives without a discernible beginning or end. 'Each painting is a capsule of time and space,' writes critic Emily LaBarge, 'a palimpsest of effort and care, a portal into an intimate conversation between artist and canvas in which the journey of the work remains pulsing just beneath its surface.' She punctuates these layers with a contrasting dash of colour or energetic line, drawing the viewer in, only to disrupt their gaze with unexpected elements. These elements are often suggestive of corporeal forms that emerge and recede from view in an otherworldly space, as if captured in the process of becoming.
An enigmatic storyteller, Megan Rooney works across a variety of media – including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and language – to develop interwoven narratives. The body has a sustained presence in her work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her practice. The subjects of her works are drawn directly from her own life and surroundings, while her references are deeply invested in the present moment. She addresses the myriad effects of politics and society that manifest in the home and on the female body. Recurring characters and motifs form part of a dreamlike narrative that is never fixed, but obliquely references some of the most urgent issues of our time.
Painting on uniform canvases measuring 200 x 150 cm – the wingspan of the average woman – Rooney presents layers of ethereal forms, often sanded back and painted over multiple times to create abstracted narratives without a discernible beginning or end. 'Each painting is a capsule of time and space,' writes critic Emily LaBarge, 'a palimpsest of effort and care, a portal into an intimate conversation between artist and canvas in which the journey of the work remains pulsing just beneath its surface.' She punctuates these layers with a contrasting dash of colour or energetic line, drawing the viewer in, only to disrupt their gaze with unexpected elements. These elements are often suggestive of corporeal forms that emerge and recede from view in an otherworldly space, as if captured in the process of becoming.
The artist's distinctive palette, strong sense of materiality and evocative use of colour are central to her practice, uniting her work across media. As curator Anna Lena Seiser describes, 'colour becomes a wildfire, a living element that morphs and overlaps with other bodies, swallows them up, takes hold of the space and weaves everything together.' Rooney's large-scale murals, ephemeral creations that respond to the surrounding architectural space, are often placed in dialogue with sculptural works to create an enveloping environment. These sculptures, created from household materials, found objects and fabric scraps, are tangibly linked to her paintings through their textured palettes and deft brushstrokes. The same is true of her performance works, in which painterly elements seem to have taken on a life of their own, with dancers moving to the scores of her prose poems.
Based in London, Rooney grew up between South Africa, Brazil and Canada, completing her BA at the University of Toronto followed by an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London in 2011. Her work has been shown in recent solo museum exhibitions at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (2024); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2020–21); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2020); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2019); and Tramway Glasgow (2017). Her 2024 exhibition at Kettle's Yard was accompanied by a performance entitled SPIN DOWN SKY, choreographed by Temitope Ajose-Cutting, performed by Temitope Ajose-Cutting and Leah Marojevic and with music by Tyrone Isaac Stuart. Another performance, EVERYWHERE BEEN THERE, created in collaboration with Temitope Ajose-Cutting and musician Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, premiered at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2019. The year prior, she performed SUN DOWN MOON UP as part of the Serpentine Galleries' Park Nights programme in London.
Rooney's work has also been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2021); Lyon Biennale (2019); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019 and 2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Venice Biennale (2017); David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2017 and 2014); and Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2014), among others. Her work is held in major institutional collections, including the Ackland Art Museum, North Carolina; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Frac Île-de-France, Paris; ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), Miami, Florida; Museum MCAN, West Jakarta; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and Muzeul de Artă Recentă, Bucharest, among others.
Videos
Kettle's Yard, Cambridge
Artworks
Installations
Performances
One dancer, clad in all black, has been cast as the bolas spider, also known as an ‘angling’ or ‘fishing’ spider for the way it hunts its prey: eschewing the typical orb web of a regular arachnid, it instead employs a long silk line with a sticky blob on the end, which it swings and affixes to its target, reeling it in to its demise. The other dancer, in pleated trousers and a pale, patterned shirt, is a night butterfly, also known as a moth, and the name, too, of a rare and velvety red dahlia flower that attracts flying insects. It is a love story? Can unhappy bed fellows, preternaturally opposed in nature, make a life together?
— Excerpt from Spin Down Sky by Emily LaBarge
Directed by Megan Rooney, choreography by Temi Ajose, performed by Temi Ajose and Leah Marojevic, and sound by tyroneisaacstuart
Commissions
The Scalpel, London, collection of Ho Bee Land
Seasonal weather shifts and light conditions play a vital role in my work. The paintings both draw from and steal atmospheres, impressions and images lodged inside my memory... a willow tree reflected in a city pond, immense and open, the profound realization that contained inside the bloom of an ordinary tulip bulb lives an entire universe of color hidden to most rushing past. These small observations inform the painting's delicate interplay of color and light, as I sand back to reveal layers of pigment. To paint is always to start at the beginning and yet I carry with me the memory of all the paintings that have come before. I ask (and wish) the viewer to feel this lineage when confronted with my work, so they might be transported back in time with me, to a different iteration of the story.
— Megan Rooney
Megan Rooney at Fondation Louis Vuitton La Couleur en Fugue
Further works
You spend your life as a painter developing a relationship to colour and then testing the limits of that relationship. It’s radical, it’s ever-changing – it can submit to you and it can betray you. It always seduces, always excites. — Megan Rooney
Thaddaeus Ropac London is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Megan Rooney. In Yellow Yellow Blue, Rooney allows her mark-making to be led almost entirely by colour, as she continues her ongoing investigation into abstraction as a means of storytelling. The London exhibition follows the recent opening of the exhibition JOAN MITCHELL / MEGAN ROONEY: PAINTING FROM NATURE (2025), at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, which continues until 19 October 2025, as well as Rooney’s first major UK solo exhibition, Echoes & Hours at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2024).
Spanning the gallery’s two floors at Thaddaeus Ropac London, Yellow Yellow Blue presents a group of new works on canvas in Rooney’s signature ‘wingspan’ format, equivalent to the full reach of the artist’s outstretched arms, alongside a number of large-scale canvases which invoke the encompassing presence of her murals, and a selection of works on paper. The body has a sustained presence in Rooney’s work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her interdisciplinary practice. Combining painting with dance, the exhibition will be accompanied by a new performance piece directed by Rooney and made in close collaboration with Temitope Ajose, Leah Marojević and the musician tyroneisaacstuart. Taking place on 12 June, Spin Down Sky II marks the latest chapter in the unlikely love story of a night butterfly and bolas spider, symbolic characters first explored by Rooney over two performances at Kettle’s Yard in 2024.
All painting is about storytelling. I feel the act of painting connects me to the oldest parts of humanity. Telling stories is a central part of the human condition. This impulse to leave a trace, to make a mark, to say I was here. — Megan Rooney
Created concurrently in yearly cycles through a ritual of layering, sanding down and repainting, Rooney’s canvases are repositories of time and memory, each accumulating traces of their environment, whether it is the subtle shifts in weather and light, the tensions of an uncertain world or the artist’s internal landscape. Rooney refers to her groups of paintings as ‘families’: born out of the same atmospheric conditions, they are intimately connected to one another as well as the lineage of paintings that precedes them. Together they make echoes, share resemblances and form complex, interwoven narratives. They have ‘lifespans’, writes critic Emily LaBarge. ‘Paintings, like the people who make them, can change by the day, are good- and bad-humoured, rebel, accede, talk back, learn hard lessons, long to escape their boundaries, swell with joy, accomplish what they hope, feel buoyant, dismayed, overjoyed…’
In her latest body of work, Rooney explores the chromatic territory between yellow and blue, and the abundant spectrum of green that emerges from mixing these two colours. Completed in the months that heralded spring, as winter’s darkness gave way to the luminous renewal of foliage and life, Yellow Yellow Blue captures a period of fertile seasonal transition. As she says, ‘I have a special relationship to all the seasons because the light varies dramatically depending on the month, but spring is particularly sacred to me. Long before green returns, nature slowly begins to add colour to her palette.’ Although resolutely abstract, Rooney’s works contain fleeting suggestions of recognisable forms. Shapes of ladders, beehives, clouds, trees, skies and tombs weave through the exhibition, like fugitive glimpses of a half-dreamed world.
At different stages of the painting, I take on different roles. For most of the painting’s life, I am tunnelling into the core of the painting, trying to get deeper. Then I become an excavator, unearthing forms which lay buried deep within the surface of the paint. Late in the painting’s life, I become bird-like. I want to fly on the surface, so I am looking for places to touch down. — Megan Rooney
