Weekend Focus: Fiona Mackay

One can approach the work by Fiona Mackay best by envisioning a possibly but not necessarily connected sequence of „events with painterly means“. These undertakings evolve in the realm of an exhibition or in relation to a given place or space. The beginnings lie between personal narration and the commonly used sign-systems or associative terms, words and objects as ‘roots’. In a blunt gesture, without a sketch but intuitively Mackay applies directly onto the canvas individual cycles between figuration and abstraction. The artist develops syntactic bodies of work that reverberate in the exhibition space like sound waves – being radically open to subjective perception. The works, intense and luminescent, reveal an uncommon marriage of solidity and fluidity, monumentality and domesticity, the earnest and the whimsical, achieving a maximum impact with limited means.

An important aspect of her exhibitions encompasses the creation of a text that frames and contextualizes the works presented and its underlying narration. The below press release and the exhibitions views presented are taken from her exhibition dreams. from JAN 18 – MAR 2, 2019 at Klemm’s.

dreams.

„I was in the winter of my life,

And the men that I met along the road were my only summer.”

— Lana  Del Rey

dreams. A fragment of time from 2017 to 2019, from the North to the South and back again where repetitions recur as hallucinations in both day and in night, awake or asleep. Leaving dreams to continue endlessly, where dreaming generally is forbidden.

The second solo exhibition of Fiona Mackay showcases a glimpse into the painter’s world of hallucinatory imagery, manifested as paintings on paper. Like reoccurring dreams, gestures, motifs and colors repeat throughout her works. The everydayness of paper as a supporting material is tied to the world of tactile reality, while its fragility and lightness – an innate quality of paper – is symbiotic to the sublime, whimsical world of dreams.

“Who belonged to no one – who belonged to everyone.

Who had nothing, who wanted everything,

With a fire for every experience

And an obsession for freedom

That terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about it –

And pushed me to a nomadic point

Of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me.“

— Lana  Del Rey

Fiona Mackay (1984, Aberdeen, Scotland) lives and works in Brussels and Marseille. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Arts in 2006. Recent solo and two person exhibitions in collaboration with Manuela Gernedel include “Running Away“ at New Joerg, Vienna and “Coma“ at VIS, Hamburg; “Sisters” at Albert Baronian, Brussels and “TOURIST” at Galerie Martin Van Zomeren, Amsterdam, “Syntax” at OUTPOST, Norwich, England and “Ghosts” at S.I.C., Brussels. Her work was a.o. presented in group exhibitions such as “Vensters’ Kunsthal Amersfoort, Netherlands, “Why Painting Now?” at galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna, “Wanton Mobility” at Klemm’s, Berlin,“Paradise” at Gallery Conrads, Düsseldorf, “The Ventriloquist, Timothy Taylor, London (UK) and ‘Where Language Stops’, Wilkinson Gallery, London.