Marcelyn McNeil: Works

This debut monograph from painter Marcelyn McNeil places her work within a critical context and embodies the artist’s aesthetic principles and intuitive, considered practice. Resisting categorization, McNeil synthesizes different modes of abstraction while focusing on process. Her recent works celebrate the evocative power of color and simple, clear gestures. With an accompanying interview and essay that provide a framework for engaging with the work, this volume suggests new ways to view, question, and appreciate contemporary painting.

Marcelyn McNeil creates both intimate- and large-scale oil abstractions that evolve primarily through pouring methods. Adopting a lyrical call-and-response attitude toward process, the artist uses multiple layers, stains, and bleeds of thinned pigment that fade into one another—suggesting a space that is both formed and unformed. McNeil’s quietly subversive work experiments with illusion, perspective and color to create a place for unmediated introspection.

Born in Kansas, Marcelyn McNeil received an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Solo exhibitions of McNeil’s work have taken place at: Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas; Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas; Galveston Art Center in Galveston, Texas; Kathryn Markel in New York City; Robischon in Denver, Colorado; and Central Features in Albuquerque, New Mexico; among others. Group exhibitions including McNeil’s work have taken place at: San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas; Denny Gallery in New York City; Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles, California; McClain Gallery in Houston, Texas; and Joymore Gallery in Chicago, Illinois; among others. McNeil’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas and the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas. A monograph, Marcelyn McNeil Works, was published by Radius Books in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2022. Included in the book are writings by Hesse McGraw, Executive Director at CAM Houston in Texas, and Alison Hearst, a curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. McNeil currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas.