American. Lives and works in New York, USA.
Margaret`s fascination with scale dislocation and monumentality developed during 8 years in Rome, where she taught and painted still life as visionary cities, and then placed giant figures in them. A Fulbright brought her there to study depictions of saints and apply their strange fusion of the neurotic and sublime to portraiture – a project that led to criptosanti and eventually headworks – self-portraits with the stuff of thought in architectural configurations piled on her head. The space in her paintings tends toward horror vacui – probably from growing up in a large family. She also likes foreshortening’s cubist contradictions – forms projecting into space while shapes stack up on the picture-plane. Living in Atlantic City inspired much recent work – it’s surprisingly poetic vistas recall Antonioni, and its small scale sculptural quality Rome. But unlike the gravity of The Eternal City, irony is ever-present in an R. Crumb way.
website: http://margaretmccann.com