Megan Rooney

Megan Rooney works across a variety of media, including painting, installation and performance. Created in cycles, her paintings develop from accumulations of gesture and colour that are instinctively built up and sanded back. They become capsules of time, absorbing traces of their environment as well as the artist’s own inner landscape. 

For Rooney, who often works on a large scale, painting is as much a process of layering as it is one of retrieval – a physical exchange in which forms are gently coaxed or wrestled into being. She resists a purely superficial treatment of the canvas, instead alternating between paintbrush and power sander to work into the pictorial surface. Through this constant, often antagonistic, negotiation, Rooney grapples with the very conditions of her medium, probing its flatness and the resilience of the painted stroke. ‘The painting must fight for its own survival, if it is to exist at all,’ she says. The final character of a work is never predetermined; though guided by the artist, each painting ultimately finds completion on its own terms, and what remains on the surface is that which withstands. 

The forms that collect in Rooney’s paintings find temporary embodiment in her encompassing, site-specific murals. While the canvas functions as a lasting container for a sustained and protracted process – accruing evidence of the artist’s movements and compressing multiple temporalities – her murals, painted directly onto walls, are inevitably removed and destroyed as a consequence of their context. For Rooney, there is something radical about creating colossal paintings with finite lifespans. ‘Foregrounding radical impermanence is a way to be in the world,’ she says. Rooney’s performances are also episodic in nature, and just as she considers mural painting a three-way collaboration between body, forklift and architecture, her performances are the result of an equally dynamic, reciprocal process involving dancers, choreographers and musicians with whom she shares longstanding relationships. Through these live enactments, she translates the gestures and rhythms of her painting into movement and sound, broadening the language of her storytelling across these distinct yet interconnected media. 

Recent solo museum exhibitions include Echoes & Hours, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2024); HUSH SKY MURMUR HOLE, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2020); Green, I Want You Green, Salzburger Kunstverein (2020–21); and Fire On The Mountain, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2019). Her work was recently presented in the exhibition Joan Mitchell / Megan Rooney: PAINTING FROM NATURE, held at the Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing in 2025. Her performance EVERYWHERE BEEN THERE, created in collaboration with choreographer 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. Her works are held in public and private collections worldwide, including Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Arts Council Collection, London; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Baltimore Museum of Art; Ackland Museum of Art, Chapel Hill; and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, among others. The artist lives and works in London.