Hold your Breath (detail), 2024
Oil on linen
24 x 18 inches, 61 x 45.7 cm
For inquiries, please contact Director Beryl Bevilacque:
Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Quiet Storm, an exhibition of new work by Danielle Mckinney (b. 1981; Montgomery, AL). In this ambitious new suite of oil paintings, Mckinney infuses intimate settings with radical beauty and striking emotional sway. Quiet Storm comes on the heels of the opening of Mckinney’s first institutional solo exhibition, Fly on the Wall, on view at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy through October 2024.
Throughout her intimately-scaled portraits, Mckinney imagines solitary female protagonists—nestled in dream-like domestic interiors—in moments of leisure and respite. In the twelve paintings in Quiet Storm, Mckinney conjures a spiritual—and physical—mise-en-scène. As Mckinney’s figures lounge on velvety sofas, nap in pillow-strewn beds, drag on cigarettes—fully immersed in their own interiority—a storm brews. Rain falls softly on the roof, thunder rumbling in the distance, the smell of petrichor creeping through cracks in the windows. A quiet storm brews internally, as well. Tranquil but electrified, these women ground themselves, corporeally and emotionally, in this moment alone.
With her newest suite of paintings, Mckinney continues her ongoing dialogue with the histories of photography and painting. Trained as a photographer, Mckinney primes her canvases with a black ground, pulling her figures and settings out of shadow as if developing film in a darkroom. Compiling her compositions from various sources—adopting a pose from a 19th century photograph, borrowing the tilt of a head from a vintage magazine photoshoot, imitating a coy expression from a famous painting—Mckinney nevertheless infuses her paintings with a singular vision, with a specificity entirely her own.
While photography has long inspired Mckinney’s practice, her newest body of work bears the undeniable influence of a pantheon of painterly source material. Reminiscent of Zurbarán's haunting portraits of saints and martyrs, Mckinney’s figures in Hold your Breath and Zion emerge from deep, dark backgrounds. Gestural brushstrokes and flickers of brilliant pink and orange in Evening Star and Sacrament evoke Matisse. The masterfully crafted interiors of Read the Room and Memoir draw, at once, on the intense, unsettling voyeurism of Hopper and lyrical domesticity of Chase. The striking, narrative quality of light and the subtle reduplication of her figures in shadows and reflections in Winter Sonnet and Chase’s Mirage echo Vermeer and Velázquez. Mckinney’s experimentation with painting as inspiration and source material lends itself to a body of work that—like any great painting—is timeless and elusive, never fully revealing its secrets.
Intimate in both content and scale, Mckinney’s paintings offer a certain emotional truth. While she appropriates histories of portraiture throughout her practice, Mckinney’s figures are imagined—conjured from a confluence of photographs and paintings and memories. These women may not be real—not drawn from life—yet, they contain something truer. Just as Matisse paints the feeling an object gives him, Mckinney captures a feeling of taking a moment to oneself during a quiet storm—of calm solitude amidst a tempestuous world.
ABOUT DANIELLE MCKINNEY
Danielle Mckinney’s (b. 1981, Montgomery, AL) practice is an ongoing exploration of portraiture, color, and composition informed by an expansive dialogue with art history. Her first solo institution exhibition, Fly on the Wall, is on view at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy. Her work has been featured in a number of recent group exhibitions, 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 and Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; 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's work is collected by many prominent 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. 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. She is represented by Marianne Boesky, New York and Aspen, and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris and London.
