Whitney McVeigh was born in New York (1968) and lives and works in London. She has traveled extensively for her work, with significant periods spent in South Africa, India and China. McVeigh has held residencies with Centre for Arts, India, NY Arts Beijing, Centro de las Artes, San Agustín, Mexico, Nirox Foundation and David Krut Projects, South Africa. She was nominated for the Sovereign European Art prize by Saatchi Gallery director Rebecca Wilson and was featured in BBCFour documentary, Where is Modern Art Now. The artist attended the Louise Bourgeois Salon in New York and has lectured at the Wits University and Artist's Proof Studio in Johannesburg. Her works have been exhibited in both solo and group shows internationally with recent solo exhibitions including Archaeology of Memory at Nirox Projects, Johannesburg and SMAC Gallery, Cape Town as well as New Work at the A Foundation, London, curated by Sotiris Kyriacou. McVeigh participated in the significant group show, Identity Theft, curated by James Putnam at Mimmo Scognamiglio, Milan. Her work is held in private collections word-wide.
McVeigh holds a BA Honours degree in Painting, from Edinburgh College of Art. During her studies, she began to explore visual arts in relation to sculptural form and the portrait. Operating through a combination of intention and accident, McVeigh’s work ranges from large-scale monoprints to delicate drawings and collages on found paper, exploring the visceral capabilities of perception with a vivid immediacy that celebrates the potential of the medium to provoke various readings. Using travel as her greatest muse, McVeigh’s work is informed by notions of transcendence evoking discoveries of the psyche. Her monoprints are like maps of a shared interior, and her Heads Series occupy undiscovered truths of the subconscious, blurring the lines between figuration and abstraction. Her ink on paper works capture the subconscious through the drips and arabesques of black that are shadowed by ethereal grey washes. At first glance, works of her Head Series and other figurative drawings seem like portraiture, but upon deeper examination, abstract landscapes appear bearing a psychological place removed from material reality. Since dismantling medical texts in China in 2007, the artist has worked with pages of old books, looking at texture and how a surface can be transformed through handling. McVeigh isolates the pages of found books, applying line and oil that together explore notions of identity and existence.