Megan Menzies
Overview
“I use colour symbolically. A red cheek pressed against the cool glass of a car window produces a haze of colour, turning an ordinary grey and green motorway landscape pink. The landscape blushes nostalgically and the raindrops that slide down to the bottom of the window glimmer behind the rose-tinted glass.” - Megan Menzies
In her paintings Megan Menzies depicts uncanny moments and situations that have a highly developed sense of atmosphere and feeling. A head on the horizon. A tear in an ear. A hard shoulder in the rain. Her process involves drawing, painting and writing to explore memory, personal experience and storytelling. She often focuses on ordinary moments that have a heavy, melancholic quality, where time thickens and small details are valued and intensified.
Megan uses colour symbolically. A red cheek pressed against the cool glass of a car window produces a haze of colour, turning an ordinary grey and green motorway landscape pink. The landscape blushes nostalgically and the raindrops that slide down to the bottom of the window glimmer behind the rose-tinted glass.
Megan often returns to the motif of the blushing cheek to explore ideas of heightened sensitivity, emotional vulnerability and embarrassment. She is interested in the psychology of the blush and its relationship with the practice of painting itself – both painting and blushing being complicated indications of feeling. While one is voluntary and the other not, Megan sees both painting and blushing as strange and muddled forms of expression and thinks of each painting as a sort of blush.
The spaces Megan depicts in her work often have an unreal, dreamlike, illusionistic or cinematic quality. Exploring the translucent qualities of oil paint, layering techniques, superimposition and glazing is integral to Megan’s process and in particular the representation of storytelling, recollection and blushing. She is interested in the act of looking and the different layers we bring to the experience of looking – memory, feeling, identity. By experimenting with form and technique, Megan strives to get closer to the emotional core of the dreamlike moments at the heart of her paintings.
Biography
Megan Menzies (b. 1995, UK) is an artist based in London. She graduated from a BA in History of Art at the University of Bristol in 2016, followed by completing an MA in Painting at Royal College of Art in 2022. In the same year, she presented a solo exhibition, TINTO at La Causa gallery, Madrid. We exhibited her work in our NOW Introducing 2022 Open Call and Art Prize exhibition where she was selected as the winner. As a part of the prize, we have been mentoring her since November 2022.
Her work has been featured in group exhibitions with multiple galleries including: Huxley Parlour, London (2023); Liliya Gallery, London (2023); The Artiststellar Gallery, London (2023); Be Art Advisors at 9 French Place, London (2023); Eve Leibe Gallery, London (2022); The Regency Town House, Brighton and Hove (2022); Rupture Xibit, London (2022); Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (2021); All Mouth Gallery, London (2020); Daniel Raphael Gallery, London (Online) (2020); Lazega Poznanska Gallery, Poznan, Poland (2018) and KontenerArt Gallery, Poznan, Poland (2017).
Her work is held in multiple public and private collections including the Soho House Permanent collection and Ancestry – 80th anniversary of the Blitz. She was the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2021).
Works
