Megan Rooney: Echoes & Hours – Review

By Laura Cumming

The painter Megan Rooney (South African-born, in 1985, but London-based) has taken the art of mural into the realm of performance. Her latest work, at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, is a multi-hued abstraction that sends your eyes right up to the ceiling in neck-tilting amazement. For three weeks, Rooney has painted directly on to these high walls, rising up and down with a cherrypicker as her bodily extension, moving the paint through a choreography of washes, scumbles, swathes, lariats and drips, spinning out skeins of magnificent colour.

There are no horizons, no figures, yet each wall springs with incident: a darkening gyre, an overcast atmosphere, a sudden expansion into light. You are up close, wallowing in a Monet lilac, or standing back for a Van Gogh yellow. The abstractions of Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, the blue of Yves Klein and Paul Thek: art history blossoms everywhere. But what is so singular is the sense of time and motion, of Rooney moving by the minute across these four walls.

Paintings on a smaller scale – the artist’s height and arm span – fill two more galleries. They are all climate, light and season. Autumn settles in; dusk goes off in Whistlerian fireworks. Space, depth and time all register, not least because Rooney often sands the surface to expose what went before. Stand before them and you feel their pull, and something of the vivid energy condensed in their making, most especially with the mural. The experience is both physical and heady: look up, look close, feel your eyes widen, or lie down, beguiled by it all, on the floor.

Star ratings (out of five)
Megan Rooney ★★★★