ART CITIES: London-Megan Rooney

Megan Rooney is a compelling and enigmatic storyteller whose multifaceted practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and language. Through this rich interplay of media, she constructs layered, interwoven narratives that blur the boundaries between the personal and the political, the poetic and the visceral. Central to her work is the body—both as an intimate point of origin and as the ultimate vessel where memory, emotion, and lived experience accumulate and take form.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive

Drawing inspiration from her immediate environment and personal history, Megan Rooney infuses her work with a sense of raw immediacy and emotional urgency. Her references are rooted firmly in the contemporary moment, reflecting the complexities of identity, gender, and domestic space. She probes the subtle and overt ways in which political forces and social norms shape the female experience, often using the domestic sphere as a charged site of tension and transformation. In “Yellow Yellow Blue”, her latest solo exhibition of new paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac London, Megan Rooney allows color to take the lead—letting chromatic intuition drive her mark-making in a bold continuation of her exploration into abstraction as a medium for narrative. Spanning both floors of the gallery, the exhibition unveils a dynamic suite of works that deepen Rooney’s visual language while reaffirming the centrality of the body as both a gestural tool and a conceptual anchor in her practice. At the heart of the show are Rooney’s signature ‘wingspan’ canvases—intimate in proportion to the artist’s own outstretched arms—alongside large-scale works that echo the enveloping physicality of her wall murals. A selection of works on paper further extends her vocabulary of movement and memory. These painted surfaces—built up in yearly cycles through a ritual of layering, abrasion, and renewal—are vessels of lived time. Each bears the sediment of accumulated experience: the moods of shifting light, the rhythm of changing seasons, the undercurrents of an unstable world, and the introspective weather of the artist’s own psyche. Rooney refers to her paintings as “families”: groups of works born under the same atmospheric conditions, marked by shared palettes, compositional echoes, and emotional resonance. These kinships form a visual lineage that binds individual canvases into a collective story. As critic Emily LaBarge writes, “Paintings, like the people who make them, can change by the day, are good- and bad-humoured, rebel, accede, talk back, learn hard lessons, long to escape their boundaries, swell with joy, accomplish what they hope…” Rooney’s paintings are alive in this way—imbued with a temperament that evolves over time and in relation to their surroundings. The exhibition also introduces “Spin Down Sky II”, a new performance work developed in close collaboration with choreographers Temitope Ajose and Leah Marojević, and musician tyroneisaacstuart. Presented on 12 June, this piece continues the surreal narrative arc of an unlikely romance between a night butterfly and a bolas spider—archetypal figures first introduced in Rooney’s performances at Kettle’s Yard in 2024. Like her visual work, the performance entwines storytelling with abstraction, gesture with mythology. In “Yellow Yellow Blue”, Rooney immerses herself in the chromatic terrain between yellow and blue, allowing the resulting spectrum of green to emerge as both subject and metaphor. Created in the early months of the year, as winter’s retreat gave way to spring’s fragile blossoming, the works are suffused with the spirit of renewal. “I have a special relationship to all the seasons,” Rooney reflects, “because the light varies dramatically depending on the month, but spring is particularly sacred to me. Long before green returns, nature slowly begins to add color to her palette.” Though her work remains defiantly abstract, Rooney’s canvases are punctuated with evanescent forms—ladder-like structures, beehives, clouds, trees, tombs—that hover at the edge of recognition. These images flicker like remnants from a half-remembered dream, offering fleeting footholds in a world that resists resolution. In this way, “Yellow Yellow Blue”, becomes both a chromatic landscape and a psychic one: a place where color, memory, and myth converge in an ongoing act of becoming.

Photo: Megan Rooney, Spin Down Sky, 2024. Choreographed by Temitope Ajose. Performed by Temitope Ajose and Leah Marojević. Sound composition by , tyroneisaacstuart. Directed by Megan Rooney. For Echoes & Hours, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Photo: Camilla Greenwell, Courtesy Megan Rooney and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 12/6-2/8/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/