The film

In this conversation, Fiona Mackay speaks about her exhibition 40’s, a two-part presentation at Klemm’s that brings together painting, printmaking, and experimental coloration techniques to explore desire, femininity, and the emotional landscape of midlife. Through the intertwined series Roses and 40’s, Mackay reflects on the unstable terrain of the early forties, where personal experience collides with cultural expectations, clichés, and shifting ideas of intimacy.

This conversation opens onto broader questions surrounding contemporary painting and the representation of female desire: how intimacy can be pictured without becoming illustrative, how clichés and notions of bad taste can be reclaimed as artistic strategies, and how painting continues to negotiate the relationship between inner experience, cultural projection, and the shifting realities of contemporary life.

About Fiona Mackay

Fiona Mackay (1984, Aberdeen, Scotland) lives and works between Antwerp, Belgium and Marseille, France. Mackay’s painting is an ongoing negotiation between personal perception and emotional experience as they move toward more abstract, typological, and universal dimensions of the human condition. Her gaze encompasses a wide range of dreamlike, mnemonical (or fantasizing) landscapes to the recent, almost narrative scenes drawn from observations of urban life. Throughout, her work oscillates between ironic distance and absolute directness. The clear act of printing is counterbalanced by the oneiric lines of her compositions. Color is not used to describe but rather to evoke. Form remains fluid.