Megan Rooney: The Living Surface of Painting An interview with the artist

Megan Rooney’s paintings exist in a state of flux—at once tactile and atmospheric, intuitive and exacting. Her process unfolds through cycles of layering, abrasion, and renewal, transforming the canvas into a living surface that holds memory, gesture, and time. Each work bears the physical rhythm of its making, its sedimented color fields absorbing traces of weather, emotion, and thought.

Born in South Africa and raised between Brazil and Canada, the London-based artist has cultivated a painterly language that moves fluidly between abstraction and storytelling. Across painting, performance, and installation, Rooney explores how colour operates as both structure and narrative, how gesture translates the body’s intelligence, and how painting can still convey the emotional density of lived experience. Her signature “wingspan” format—scaled to the reach of her outstretched arms—anchors this physicality, aligning the act of painting with the dimensions of breath, movement, and human proportion.

In “Yellow Yellow Blue”, her summer exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac London, Rooney immersed viewers in a chromatic terrain between yellow and blue—a fertile spectrum of greens that embodied renewal, transition, and the cyclical nature of making. Also shown this year, in “Painting from Nature” at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing, her canvases entered into dialogue with Joan Mitchell’s gestural landscapes, reaffirming painting as a vital, embodied language shared across generations.

Rooted in an understanding of painting as both material and temporal, Rooney’s practice continues to expand the possibilities of abstraction. Her surfaces seem to breathe with duration: they record not only what is seen but what is felt. In the following conversation for Whitewall, she reflects on gesture, color, and the necessity of slowness—on why painting, for her, remains an act of devotion to perception, memory, and the human experience of being alive.