Megan Menzies

Megan Menzies’ practice centres on an exploration of memory, personal experience and storytelling. The experiences she depicts are often melancholy moments, as the artist describes it, ‘where time thickens and small details are valued and intensified.’ Taking these moments as a point of departure for her works on canvas, Menzies begins a prolonged period of reflection, building her compositions through extensive exploratory sketches and observations. 

Menzies presents these memories and reflections in imagined, often dreamlike, spaces that allow room for their heightened expression. The artist’s formal experimentation is a response to and means of exploring Menzies’ fascination with the act of looking, and how this experience is inflected by memory, identity and feeling. Colour is used symbolically, often layering pink hues on her figures and landscapes, Menzies seeks to recreate a rose-tinted nostalgia and sense of blushing as she reflects on these memories. Building her canvas in layers, pushing the possibilities of the paint, use of superimposition and glazing combine to render her compositions hazy with a richly textured surface. 

Menzies (born 1992) graduated from University of Bristol with a BA in History of Art in 2016, before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Her work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions in the UK and Europe and she is a 2022 Now Introducing Prizewinner from Studio West, London and a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant in 2021. 

Menzies lives and works in London.