Get lost in Megan Rooney’s abstract, emotional paintings

The experience of looking at Megan Rooney’s work is full of surprises. Immediately striking is the size – Rooney paints freely in the ‘wingspan’ format, where she paints as far as her arm can reach – and in the glorious gradients of colours. Look closer, and stories begin to reveal themselves in the fluidity of the works, rich in references and physical touchpoints.

Rooney, who refers to each group of work as a ‘family’, has explored the territory between yellow and blue, stepping into the rich prism of green, for her new body of work at Thaddaeus Ropac London. Marking a moment of transition from one season to the next, each painting tells its own story yet is linked to the other works in an embodiment of a clear narrative.

‘Each painting has its own personality, and the lifespan in each painting is really different from its neighbour,’ says Rooney, speaking from her studio in south-west London the week before her exhibition opening. ‘It’s a slow, protracted process over many months, where I go back and forth in and out of the painting while it accumulates information – different tensions, different emotions, different colour responses. It's actually really slow, even though the paintings have a feeling of movement. But that is a bit misleading, because the movement, for me, comes towards the end of the painting’s life.’

Through a process of layering, undoing, scrubbing, sanding, waiting and repainting, Rooney creates a rich relationship with the work that goes deeper than the surface of a first impression. ‘At the beginning, I am stuck with something blank and empty, and I don't know it. So I like to accelerate quickly through the beginning part, because I don't like new friends. It’s a medium that is very elusive: you're dealing with paint, and it has to dry and set, and has its own agenda, and unless you're willing to be very patient with it, you end up just moving things around that haven't really percolated on the surface.

‘I spend an inordinate amount of time getting to know the paintings in order that I might work out what they are. I never think of them as regularly abstract. But I also don't know what the form is going to be. I don't know what the subject of the painting is. I don't even know where I'm going, so I spend most of my life with the paintings, in the dark, just trying to get one or two steps ahead of them.’

Rooney is led by the possibilities of colour in the paintings, each of which vividly brings its own distinctive landscape to life. In flux, the thickly drawn mark-makings and tumultuous swirls of colour tell an ever-changing story, hinting at occasionally recognisable forms throughout but always ruled by a dreamy, fluctuating mood.

‘I'm really against formulaic painting. You have to want to investigate the surface. My paintings are notoriously difficult to photograph, and they make us work a little bit harder to decode. It is something that I think pulls the viewer in to spend more time with the work, figuring out its logic, which I think is something that's really lacking in a lot of contemporary painting today. There’s a formula where you see one painting, and you can scan around the room and get the whole show, and I want to resist that. Maybe that's where the storytelling aspect comes in, because each painting has so much of its own narrative, you have to decipher that, and it can be disorienting.’

There is an almost hallucinatory effect in the depth of the yellow, blue and green, and the endless plays it offers the eye. ‘I initially started with the idea of exploring the colour relationship between yellow and blue, because sometimes it's nice to give yourself a jumping-off point. Yellow is very wet, very cold, rainy, chaotic spring. Blue is a more meditative, contemplative colour. There was the idea of interacting with those two parameters; to me, they are opposed. Even though they're complementary, they make me do different things.’

Megan Rooney, 'Yellow Yellow Blue' is at Thaddaeus Ropac London until 2 August 2025, ropac.net