Whitney McVeigh

Whitney McVeigh was born in New York, USA in 1968. She studied at the
Edinburgh College of Art where she began to explore visual arts in relation
to sculptural form and the portrait head. McVeigh has traveled extensively
for her work, with significant periods spent in Europe, India and China
while keeping a home base in the UK. In 2006 she attended the Salon of
Louise Bourgeois in New York where she gave a short talk about her current
work. She has worked on portrait commissions and has shown both in solo and
group shows internationally.

In October 2009 McVeigh exhibited at London's A Foundation, a solo show
curated by Sotiris Kyriacou. She was nominated by Rebecca Wilson (Saatchi
Gallery) in 2008 for the sovereign European Art Prize. In November, 2009 she
featured in BBCFour documentary, Where is Modern Art Now.
More recently McVeigh was artist in resident at the Nirox Foundation in
South Africa.

McVeigh makes her work through a process of automatism. She explores themes
of sexuality and of male/female bodily form and the recurrent theme of the
portrait head is present in her work. Her treatment is figuration, in the
spirit of contemporary artists ranging from Francis Bacon to the more
abstract mark makers Cy Twombley and Robert Motherwell. She sees her 'Heads'
as an "intimate study of human truth". Like the sculpted heads of Elisabeth
Frink, McVeigh’s ‘Heads’ paintings allude to the tension between universal
human frailty and the totemic qualities of the human image that are central
to ancient and 'primitive’art.

Whitney McVeigh will be exhibiting with Nicola Togneri at Four All Saints in
London in November 2011 and with David Krut in New York in November 2011.