Current
19.5 – 2.6 2026
Megan Menzies:On Reflection
3-5 Swallow Street Project Space
Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present On Reflection, an exhibition of new works by London-based artist, Megan Menzies. The exhibition will present a suite of eleven paintings, made in the last year and will be the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Menzies’ works depict moments and experiences filtered through different perspectives and timeframes, resulting from and provoking introspection, meditating on the visual and sensorial possibilities of painting and seeing.
The artist begins with drawing, which she uses as a personally and formally reflective process, in order to contemplate memories, organise her compositions, and build visual comparisons. Translating these to canvas, Menzies’ paintings act as reflections – as the title of the exhibition suggests – of everyday moments or things which she has absorbed: trees, fields, and rippled pools, glimpsed fleetingly, either directly, or at times indirectly through the window of an aeroplane or moving train. Menzies’ ekphrastic approach, which relays both expressive and visual descriptions, invites a fluidity into her imagery. The artist locates an elasticity within her visual phenomena, revelling in their mirroring and resemblance of one another: the boundary between a voluminous mass of cloud collapses into the dense canopy of a tree, or the neat strands of plaited hair blur with the furrowed lines of a ploughed field.
The porosity of the artist’s forms reflects the elusive nature of memory as perspective shapes interpretation and time blunts the sharpness of recollection. Menzies uses colour to reveal the temporal frameworks that underpin her practice – building her paintings up through sedimentary layers of colour, an initial layer of vibrant blushing pink is veiled in a cooler green. In several of the paintings, these foundational layers are obfuscated beneath a kaleidoscopic palette of luminous yellows and shimmering blues. Filtering her works in this way, Menzies inserts a distance and intangibility into them, framing them within a dream-like dimension which is neither past nor present.
[HP] Describe where you produce your work, and why you chose that space. [MM] I share a studio space in Hackney Wick with a very good friend and artist, Lara Davies. It’s in an old warehouse building on a floor with lots of different types of creative studios. It has a window, it doesn’t get too cold in winter or too hot in summer, it’s big enough for both of us and there’s a fire escape/balcony overlooking Stratford where we like to sit outside and eat our lunch in the summer!
[HP] What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given. [MM] When it comes to creativity and imagination one of my tutor’s at the RCA always suggested thought experiments. He told me to imagine being a fly. To fly around scenes in my imagination and always look for different view points and perspectives.
The Works
11
Megan Menzies
On Reflection
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Field Perspective
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Both Sides Now
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Balance
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Plough
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Plait
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Middle
2026
Oil on jute
Megan Menzies
Middle
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Hover
2026
Oil on jute
Megan Menzies
Mother and Child
2026
Oil on canvas
Megan Menzies
Thinking About Thinking
2026
Oil on canvas
B. United Kingdom1995
Biography
Megan Menzies’ practice explores the poetry of the everyday through dreamlike scenes shaped by memory and involuntary emotion. Fleeting observations play a central role, as her work shifts between perspectives and scales, using cropping and repetition to suggest the fragmented nature of recollection, where moments resurface unexpectedly and meaning alters over time. Beginning with a prolonged process of drawing in charcoal, Menzies builds narratives through visual association before translating them into paint. Translucent layers of oil and glazing create surfaces that seem to shimmer, reinforcing the hazy, dreamlike quality of her imagery. Throughout her work, blushing tones of pink and green recur as both palette and metaphor, drawing on the blush as an involuntary bodily reaction – an expression of sensitivity and emotional exposure – positioning painting itself as an irrepressible expression of feeling.
Menzies was born in 1995 in Essex, United Kingdom. She earned a BA in History of Art from the University of Bristol (2016) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2022). She was a Now Introducing Prizewinner at Studio West Gallery, London (2022), and is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2021, 2025). In 2025, she completed a residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy. Recent solo exhibitions include Glimpse at LKIF Gallery, Seoul (2024) and TINTO at La Causa Gallery, Madrid (2022). Selected group exhibitions include the John Moores Painting Prize Exhibition at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2025); KIAF Art Fair with LKIF Gallery (2025, 2024); Minestrone at Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2025); Voyage Voyage II at The Platform Gallery, Antwerp (2024); Embraced at Rhodes Gallery, London (2024); and NOW (online showcase) at Huxley-Parlour, London (2023). Menzies lives and works in London.
Megan Menzies:On Reflection
19.5 - 2.6.2026
Current
Hours
Monday to Friday, 10:00am - 5:30pm
Gallery
3-5 Swallow Street, Project Space
London
W1B 4DE