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拍品专文
A tender, cinematic portrait of womanhood, Danielle Mckinney’s Other Worldly (2021) features a solitary female figure indulging in a moment of quite repose. It is for such intimate and introspective depictions of female life that Mckinney is celebrated. Recent solo exhibitions include Fly on the Wall at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and About a moment – in a moment, at the Kunsthal n, Copenhagen, both in 2024. That same year Mckinney was included in the landmark exhibition The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, which toured from the National Portrait Gallery, London to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of major museums and institutions across the US and Europe, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
In the present work, a woman lies on her back atop an ornate carpet, legs crossed at the ankle and folded up towards her stomach. She exhales a wisp of smoke from one of the painter’s own favoured Marlboro Red cigarettes in her right hand—a ubiquitous motif in Mckinney’s painted cosmos. The subject’s cerise lips and nails hint at another, busier life beyond the soothing confines of her richly carpeted living room. Like modern women painters such as Gabriele Münter, Mckinney is drawn to depict women within domestic interiors, often suggesting a mood of thoughtful contemplation. Staged like film-stills, these paintings echo the dioramas the artist would make as a child with shoeboxes and magazine cuttings. Domestic spaces, inspiration for which Mckinney trawls 1960s and ’70s design books, place her figures within a believable, tangible world.
Mckinney typically begins each painting with a thick layer of black gesso across the surface of the canvas. ‘I was struggling because I had always worked on a white canvas and had to work to build the whole figure—the eyeballs, the eyebrows, the nose,’ she recalls; ‘And all of a sudden, I was like, black—how beautiful. It was almost like being in the dark room again’ (D. Mckinney quoted in S. Eckardt, ‘In the Studio with Danielle Mckinney, the Artist Bringing Intimate Moments to Life,’ W Magazine, 28 September 2022). Layering richly textured oil paint upon the gesso Mckinney brings lightness from the dark, evoking the same artificial lighting of her basement studio, and suggesting a quiet moment at the close of a busy day. Adopting this dramatic chiaroscuro—a favoured device of Caravaggio and Francisco de Zurbarán—places Mckinney within a rich painterly tradition. It is a tradition in which she had struggled to find herself, as classical depictions of black figures—such as Édouard Manet’s Olympia—resigned them to the margins. With intimate, tender paintings like Other Worldly, Mckinney paints the history of art anew, allowing the black female body to take up space, and at the same time to simply exist.
In the present work, a woman lies on her back atop an ornate carpet, legs crossed at the ankle and folded up towards her stomach. She exhales a wisp of smoke from one of the painter’s own favoured Marlboro Red cigarettes in her right hand—a ubiquitous motif in Mckinney’s painted cosmos. The subject’s cerise lips and nails hint at another, busier life beyond the soothing confines of her richly carpeted living room. Like modern women painters such as Gabriele Münter, Mckinney is drawn to depict women within domestic interiors, often suggesting a mood of thoughtful contemplation. Staged like film-stills, these paintings echo the dioramas the artist would make as a child with shoeboxes and magazine cuttings. Domestic spaces, inspiration for which Mckinney trawls 1960s and ’70s design books, place her figures within a believable, tangible world.
Mckinney typically begins each painting with a thick layer of black gesso across the surface of the canvas. ‘I was struggling because I had always worked on a white canvas and had to work to build the whole figure—the eyeballs, the eyebrows, the nose,’ she recalls; ‘And all of a sudden, I was like, black—how beautiful. It was almost like being in the dark room again’ (D. Mckinney quoted in S. Eckardt, ‘In the Studio with Danielle Mckinney, the Artist Bringing Intimate Moments to Life,’ W Magazine, 28 September 2022). Layering richly textured oil paint upon the gesso Mckinney brings lightness from the dark, evoking the same artificial lighting of her basement studio, and suggesting a quiet moment at the close of a busy day. Adopting this dramatic chiaroscuro—a favoured device of Caravaggio and Francisco de Zurbarán—places Mckinney within a rich painterly tradition. It is a tradition in which she had struggled to find herself, as classical depictions of black figures—such as Édouard Manet’s Olympia—resigned them to the margins. With intimate, tender paintings like Other Worldly, Mckinney paints the history of art anew, allowing the black female body to take up space, and at the same time to simply exist.