Whitney McVeigh

Whitney McVeigh (born 1968) is an American visual artist and writer, best known for her paintings and installation art. She has travelled extensively to carry out her practice and held residencies in Brazil, Mexico, India, China and South Africa. Her work investigates personal and collective memory and alludes to the layering of time. Her paintings are preoccupied with the complexity and dual layers of the body and explore languages with origins in Eastern and Western philosophy. Over a twenty-year period the artist has amassed a collection of objects in the studio weighted by their unique patternations; tracing former lives and the once tangible relationship an individual may have had with the object. As an artist, she acts as custodian of these ‘markers’, isolating yet elevating the materials, entrusting them to reflect and spur philosophical understandings of history, time and memory.

Whitney McVeigh was featured in the BBC4 television documentary, Where is Modern Art Now (2009) alongside Sir Anthony Caro, Michael Landy, Grayson Perry and Cornelia Parker. She was nominated for the Sovereign European Art Prize (2008) by Saatchi Gallery director, Rebecca Wilson. Simon Schama’s recent essay on McVeigh’s practice ‘The Happenstance of Illumination’(2018) was included in his book Wordy (Simon & Schuster), published in June 2019. Her work featured in ‘Imagined Spaces’ edited by Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low with Voyage Out Press & Saraband Books (2020), an anthology that creates a “space” between understanding and the imagination. In Autumn 2022 a new collection of McVeigh’s limited editions will be launched at Renzo Piano Building Workshops’s newly designed building Shard Place (London). McVeigh’s work can be found in public and private collections worldwide.

Selected recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Temporality, Cardi Projects, Cardi Gallery (2020), What is Worthwhile Doing in this World, Mount Stuart Visual Arts, Scotland (2019), Elegy to Nature, Eykyn Maclean, New York (2018), Language of Memory, Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh (2016), Contours, Hazard Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2015), Inventory: Invisible Companion, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2015), New Work, Michael Goedhuis, London (2015) and presentation of the film ‘Birth’: Origins at the end of life at the Royal Academy, London (2015). Selected recent group exhibitions include, ‘Re-Naissance, Unit London, online (2023), Fermata, Encounter, London (2021), Photo London, Somerset House, London (2021) with Encounter, What Remains, Encounter, London (2021), Artist Rooms, Encounter, London (2020), ‘Shapes in Clouds’ Encounter, London (2019), Plato in LA: Contemporary Artists’ Visions, Getty Villa, Los Angeles (2018), Not a Single Story, The Wanas Konst Foundation, Sweden with Nirox Foundation, South Africa (2018), Culture Lines: Sans Frontieres, Metamatic-Taf Foundation, Athens (2016), Unlocking the Diary, The Archiving of Nameless Memories, Folkestone Triennial, Kent (2014) and Glass Stress, White Light/White Heat, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).

Selected Work