“There’s everything in the painting for me.” For artist Megan Rooney, painting is never static. Her paintings evolve through layers of paint, sanding, and reworking, each step carrying the traces of the world outside her London studio.
“The paintings contain something of the world in them.” Megan Rooney’s path to becoming an artist began as a teenager when art offered her a world that she didn’t need to explain to anyone. “I spend my life testing the limits of my relationship to colour and form,” she explains. “Paintings were always a way to sort of prove the world.” However, declaring herself “impatient by nature”, Rooney’s process is painstakingly slow. Rooney will add and subtract by sanding over months, even years. “If you try to rush the surface, you end up with something very superficial,” she says. She continues: “I really reject the idea of a formulaic painting, which is why the paintings have completely different compositions, energies, textures and colours.”
When speaking of colour, Megan Rooney says: “I have an antagonistic relationship to colour. I would say that I wield colour more than I use colour. I use one colour to chase out another colour in my paintings.” The paintings in Rooney’s body of work are set in a group of families. They speak to each other, and she talks to them. Rooney resists the labels like “abstract”, insisting: “There’s everything in the painting for me. There’s skin texture, there are smile lines, there’s grimaces, there’s wounds, there’s flesh, there’s eye glances.”
“I believe in art more than anything else,” Megan Rooney says, explaining how it’s saved her several times. “The world is such a complicated place to be in. I think art gives you this kind of weapon for attempting to understand some of that profundity.”
Megan Rooney (b. 1985) is based in London, but grew up in South Africa, Brazil, and Canada. She completed her BA at the University of Toronto and an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2011. Rooney’s work has recently been shown in solo museum exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2024); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2020–21); Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2020); and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2019). Her performance EVERYWHERE BEEN THERE, created in collaboration with choreographer Temitope Ajose-Cutting and musician Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, premiered at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2019. The year prior, she performed SUN DOWN MOON UP as part of the Serpentine Galleries’ Park Nights programme in London. Rooney’s work has also been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Florida (2024); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2021); Lyon Biennale (2019); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019 and 2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Venice Biennale (2017); David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2017 and 2014); and Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2014), among others.
Megan Rooney was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen at her studio and Thaddaeus Ropac in London, UK, in June 2025.
Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Produced and edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Music by tyronneisaacstuart
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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