At a moment when figurative art is enjoying something of a renaissance, Whitney McVeigh has produced a series of works that combine the expressive immediacy of gestural abstraction with the psychological depth of portraiture.

The ‘Heads’ paintings are mainly executed in acrylic inks on paper or canvas and are not portraits in the conventional sense, but adopt certain formal aspects of portraiture merely as a starting point for a more inventive take on human individuality. McVeigh has spoken of her interest in what she calls “the internal landscape: our make-up,” seeing her ‘Heads’ as representative of “a frailty beneath the…

At a moment when figurative art is enjoying something of a renaissance, Whitney McVeigh has produced a series of works that combine the expressive immediacy of gestural abstraction with the psychological depth of portraiture.

The ‘Heads’ paintings are mainly executed in acrylic inks on paper or canvas and are not portraits in the conventional sense, but adopt certain formal aspects of portraiture merely as a starting point for a more inventive take on human individuality. McVeigh has spoken of her interest in what she calls “the internal landscape: our make-up,” seeing her ‘Heads’ as representative of “a frailty beneath the complex surface of us all.” Like the sculpted heads of Elisabeth Frink, McVeigh’s ‘Heads’ paintings allude to the tension between universal human frailty and the totemic qualities of the human image that are central to ancient and ‘primitive’ art.

Alongside the ‘Heads’ which she is perhaps more known for, McVeigh makes another body of work in the form of abstract black monoprints. Sharing the importance of the process of painting and being open to the materials, as is seen with the ‘Heads’, there is more of a physicality to these works; each one is made on the floor through pressing and folding the paper. The use of black is important to McVeigh as there is no reduction process; everything is there in its force and the light filters through in the spaces in between, in the mark that a brush makes or the crumpled effect of newsprint, which is used as the ‘canvas’ for many of these works.

While in China on a residency, which she was invited to complete after the black works were seen in London, McVeigh noted the similarities between the process of calligraphy painting and Abstract Expressionism - a huge influence in her work.

McVeigh’s fluid means of applying paint to the picture surface suggests a degree of technical ‘looseness’ which actually disguises the control exercised in the production of the image. In this respect her work recalls the approach of Jean Dubuffet and certain aspects of the ‘Art Brut’ movement, which privileged an unfettered, ‘child-like’ approach to creativity as a route into more authentic image-making unconstrained by convention.

Whitney McVeigh was born in New York in 1968 and moved to the UK in 1976 where she studied at Edinburgh College of Art. She has since exhibited nationally in solo and group shows in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London and has work, including portrait commissions, in private collections worldwide. International exhibitions have been in New York, Beijing and Mexico, and she has recently had a solo show of her black & white works at the respected A Foundation in London’s Shoreditch, for which the catalogue included an essay by art writer JJ Charlesworth. She currently lives and works in London.