Oil on linen painting of a monkey hugging a toy

Robin Megannity imbues his images with the retro appearance of traditional oil paintings. Unusually for a contemporary artist, he makes use of oil paint's illusionistic potential, building up fictional scenarios in fine layers to suggest real-life scenes. He employs a changing cast of actors to pose with apparently meaningful gestures amid an assortment of symbolic props. Muted colours create claustrophobic shadows, and cryptic titles add to an atmosphere of narrative suspense. Megannity’s works operate as glimpses of storylines, petrified into enigmatic yet intriguing mysteries.

Cloth mother is an unconventional portrait. The scale and composition of the painting, a work of oil on linen, evokes centuries-old traditions of European oil painting – yet its subject, a young rhesus monkey clinging to an artificial ‘mother’, is decidedly untraditional. 

This tension is characteristic of Megannity’s work: disruptive, unexplained juxtapositions in form and content create a strange, internal dissonance within cloth mother. Megannity’s source material is a photograph from Harry Harlow’s 1960s ‘Monkey Mother’ experiments, in which monkeys preferred surrogate mothers made of cloth to those made of wire. This context adds a further dissonant dimension to the work: our intuitive animal sympathy for the monkey, and its own urge for affection, chafe against a context of mechanical and scientific indifference – complicated further by the rich aesthetic form of its translation into paint.

Robin Megannity's painting 'on oath', 2023 Oil on linen 67 x 51 cm 26 3/8 x 20 1/8 in: a glitched painting of a Dutch still life painting

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Installation shots of Robin Megannity's exhibition 'Call of The Void' at Workplace | London

Robin Megannity

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Robin Megannity

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