Abigail McGinley (b. 1999) is a painter living and working in London.
McGinley’s practice is grounded in the examining of the tension between concealment and revelation, obfuscation and disclosure and the material reality of paint and surface. Employing the body as a site of sensorial reflection, she investigates the body as both parasite and host — a metaphor for the fluctuating states of painting itself. This relationship, oscillating between activity and passivity, autonomy and dependence has informed a deliberately nonsensical continuum through which she refines her personal lexicon of form and meaning.
The palette is rooted in tertiary tones, bruised earthen colours that feel sedimented rather than applied as she layers the paint onto un-primed linen. The primed linen absorbs and stains, allowing the material to remain active whilst she attends to how the paint sits on and soaks into the surface. A process which speaks to the cycle of creation and decay. Drawing from primary visual videography and secondary film, stock photography, and printed media, McGinley collages disparate references to form compositions that prioritise atmosphere over didactive narrative.
Her paintings articulate emotional experience rather than dictating it and function as reflexive propositions — offerings of her perception and emotional experience within and to the world. They foreground the body, human and animal alike, as vessels for sensation and embodiment - hovering between the real and the imagined, the state between waking and dreaming. Through them, she constructs an authentic fiction: something that speaks to the feeling of an experience rather that the actuality.
Belief is central to McGinley’s proposal: belief in the act of painting and the belief essential in the viewer’s encounter. While her works are conceived in solitude, they cannot exist as such; they rely upon the viewer for completion. Each painting operates as an invitation or a repulsion, its conceptual pulse mirroring the tension within its imagery.
By her persistent return to the body through paint she seeks to gain a further understanding of perception, presence, tension and the sublime.