Frieze London: Danielle Mckinney

The Regent's Park, London

Booth G16

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of new oil paintings and watercolors by New Jersey-based artist Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981; Montgomery, AL) for Frieze London 2023. The artist’s first solo presentation in the U.K. offers a glimpse of Mckinney’s developing and powerful painting practice.

In pensive, cinematic portraits, Mckinney captures solitary female protagonists in moments of leisure and respite. Set in dream-like domestic interiors, Mckinney’s figures sprawl across unmade beds, lounge in overstuffed armchairs, and splay on the floor in various states of undress. They smoke, read, nap; immersed in their own worlds, ensconced in their own space, these women are consumed with rest, with pleasure, with leisure, with being. Hinting subtly at the busy routine of these figures’ lives, Mckinney withholds their motivations, their thoughts, their comings and goings—in turn captivating viewers with narratives implied in elusive shadows and revealing details.

Mckinney’s paintings for Frieze London make up a new chapter in the artist’s ongoing exploration of portraiture, color, and composition informed by an expansive dialogue with art history. Her figures emerge from deep, dark backgrounds reminiscent of Zurbarán’s haunting portraits of saints and martyrs. With gestural brushstrokes and flickers of brilliant pink and orange oil paint, Mckinney evokes the work of Matisse while the striking quality of light in her scenes—and its narrative implications—echo the paintings of Vermeer. Perhaps most notably, Mckinney draws on the intense, unsettling voyeurism of Hopper with her masterfully crafted interiors, occasionally borrowing his compositions directly, yet filling them with her own figures, her own details, her own vision. In these paintings, Mckinney ultimately enchants viewers with her expert handling of paint, the subtle emotional pull of her figures, and her radical commitment to beauty.

With this presentation, Mckinney also debuts new works in watercolor on paper—a first for the artist who has primarily worked in oil and acrylic. In these works, figures emerge from white backgrounds in quick, painterly brushstrokes. Gestural and intuitive, the watercolors represent a new facet of Mckinney’s ongoing investigation into the language and beauty of the human form.

ABOUT DANIELLE MCKINNEY

Mckinney’s work is in many museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, most recently including Presence in the Pause: Interiority and its Radical Immanence curated by Rachel Adams at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE; When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY at The Contemporary Austin, TX; and Black Melancholia at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Mckinney earned a BFA at Atlanta College of Arts in 2005 and an MFA at Parsons School of Design in 2013. The artist lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.