A painting by Robin Megannity of a woman speaking into a man's ear

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.

In the oil painting whisperers, Megannity plays with composition: his two subjects are unusually cropped, and their landscape ratio is overlaid upon a portrait linen canvas. The possibilities of privacy and intimacy, recurring themes for Megannity, play out within the work: the close-up cropping, the detailed, naturalistic rendering of the pair and the corporeal tangibility of the act and the message passing between them, are all undercut by the mystery that, for us, defines them: as Megannity tests the functions and paradoxes of painting, the viewer is allowed an intimate view of the whispering, but its content and context are entirely, paradoxically obscured.

A white walled gallery with three artworks hung on the walls and two slim windows 

Exhibition Feature Image

A white walled gallery with two artworks hung on the walls one with a face with light glittering off it and a paintin gby rachel lancaster of two hands holding a crumpled piece of paper

Robin Megannity

Related Artist

Robin Megannity

Related Exhibitions