Megan Rooney valuation
London-based painter of big, sanded-back abstractions, and of murals and performances that do not last.
Megan Rooney was born in South Africa in 1985, studied at the University of Toronto and took her MFA at Goldsmiths in London in 2011, and lives and works in London.
What a work by Megan Rooney is worth
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Bio
Megan Rooney was born in South Africa in 1985, studied at the University of Toronto and took her MFA at Goldsmiths in London in 2011, and lives and works in London. She works in painting, murals, installation, performance and poetry. Her paintings are made in cycles, layers of colour and gesture built up with the brush and worked back with a power sander, again and again, until what survives on the surface is what has withstood the process; she has described painting as hovering in flight and looking for places to land. Alongside the canvases she paints huge murals directly on gallery walls, often from a forklift, which are painted over when the exhibition ends, and makes episodic performances with dancers, choreographers and musicians, among them EVERYWHERE BEEN THERE, with the choreographer Temitope Ajose-Cutting and the musician Paolo Thorsen-Nagel. Peter Gabriel used her painting And Still (Time) for the cover of his single And Still in 2023.
Only the canvases and works on paper can change hands, since the murals are destroyed and the performances are live, so her market is in the paintings, many of them large. Their sanded, layered surfaces are part of the work and can be damaged by rubbing or careless cleaning. The date, the series and a provenance through Thaddaeus Ropac, which represents her, are the reference points.
Toronto, Goldsmiths and Kettle's Yard
Solo museum exhibitions include Fire on the Mountain at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2019, HUSH SKY MURMUR HOLE at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto in 2020 and Echoes and Hours at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge in 2024.
Her performance SUN DOWN MOON UP was part of the Serpentine's Park Nights in London in 2018, and she was in the Lyon Biennale in 2019.
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