141. Donna Mclean - Room 409

2026
Oil on board
18 x 16.5 cm
Signed on Verso

Donna McLean is a painter whose work explores polarity and paradox, bringing opposing forces into direct visual conversation — light and dark, beauty and revulsion, seduction and unease. Her paintings frequently transform objects associated with violence or danger into luminous, jewel-like images, creating works that are simultaneously alluring and unsettling.

Drawing on cinematic language, memory, and symbolism, McLean’s paintings examine the tension between attraction and discomfort. Bombs, film stills, and fragments of visual culture are scaled, reframed, and rendered with a heightened intensity that destabilises their meaning. Through this interplay between surface beauty and underlying threat, her work interrogates how images seduce, disturb, and shape emotional response.

She studied at City and Guilds of London Art School from 1983–1987.

Selected exhibitions include the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2024 & 2025); the Contemporary British Painting Prize finalist exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery (2021); the Beep Painting Biennial at Elysium Gallery, Swansea (2022); X with Contemporary British Painting at Newcastle Contemporary Art (2023); the Aesthetica Art Prize at York Art Gallery (2024); Assembly with Contemporary British Painting, Rye (2024); the Royal West of England Academy Open, Bristol (2024); the Cass Art Prize at Copeland Gallery, Peckham (2024); Darkness Visible at APT Gallery, Deptford (2025); And Still Different Worlds at Thames Side Gallery (2026); and the Ruskin Prize at Trinity Buoy Wharf (2026).

Her awards and shortlistings include the NOA Prize at Pallant House Gallery (2013); shortlistings for the Contemporary British Art Prize (2021), the Aesthetica Art Prize (2024), the Cass Art Prize (2024), and the Ruskin Prize (2026). She was also a prize winner at the Beep Painting Biennial in 2022.

Her work is held in collections including those of Richard Rogers, Ian McEwan, Sylvie Guillem, and La Colombe d'Or.