TEFAF Maastricht 2025: Danielle Mckinney in conversation with Edward Hopper

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to make its TEFAF Maastricht debut with a presentation of new paintings by Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981; Montgomery, AL) in conversation with the work of Edward Hopper (1882–1967). Featuring a suite of new paintings by Mckinney alongside four works by Hopper—a watercolor, a charcoal drawing, and two etchings—the presentation activates a dialogue on light and solitude.

Mckinney’s painting practice is a devoted engagement with art history. Her oeuvre bears the undeniable influence of a pantheon of painterly source material—from the haunting figures of Zurbarán to the brilliant colors of Matisse, from the lyrical domesticity of Chase to the subtle narrative qualities of Vermeer. This presentation focuses, in particular, on Mckinney’s affinity with the work of mid-century American realist Edward Hopper.

Situating her solitary figures in meticulously crafted settings, Mckinney draws inspiration from Hopper's cinematic use of light and shadow, and the intense, often unsettling voyeurism so characteristic of his paintings. Mckinney—who is trained as a photographer—primes her canvases with a black ground, pulling her figus and settings out of shadow as if developing film in a darkroom. The “palpable presence” of light that curator Barbara Haskell identifies in Hopper is also found in Mckinney’s intimate canvases, the cinematic—even theatrical—light casting her subjects as characters amidst a story never fully revealed. Her subjects—as Hopper’s—are defined, in large part, by their solitude: comfortably nude or wrapped in cozy bedding and lustrous, silky nightclothes, Mckinney’s women appear lost in their own thoughts.

Throughout her practice, Mckinney harnesses light to infuse her domestic scenes with a rich, emotional resonance. With Lumen (2025), Mckinney evokes the feeling of a mid-century interior while using the stark light of a sole table lamp to emphasize the figure’s languid slumber. Rays of diagonal sunlight from a window beyond view in Ember (2025) recall Hopper’s use of cross hatching to create subtle gradations of light and dark in early etchings like Evening Wind and Night Shadows, both from 1921. The brilliant chartreuse light of Yesterday (2025) channels the poetic solitude of Hopper’s 1964 Sun in an Empty Room. 

Yet, there is a fundamental difference in what Mckinney achieves through this careful application of light: where Hopper locates within his figures an abject loneliness—a sense of alienation brought on by war and by the very nature of modern life—Mckinney offers something more tender. Where Mckinney’s figures are alone, Hopper’s are outright lonely, separated from the viewer—or from their outside world—by a window or a wall or a door. Where Hopper’s figures exude unease—tension, and stiffness—in their bodies and expressions, Mckinney’s relax under the viewer’s gaze, a fully-body exhale as they drag on cigarettes or quietly doze. Taking light and solitude as her subjects, Mckinney invites the lonely modern woman into her artistic embrace, to be held lovingly, allowed to let the weight of the world fall away.

ABOUT DANIELLE MCKINNEY

Mckinney's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthal n in Copenhagen Denmark and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy. She has been featured in group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA; The Contemporary Austin, TX; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. Her work is included in a number of prominent museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; San José Museum of Art, CA; the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is the 2025 recipient of the Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award from the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. 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.