Biography

Born in 1986 in Evanston, IL, Keegan Monaghan currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. His paintings evoke the partial experience of looking, contrasting the subjectivity of first-person perspective with competing, inter-locking fields of vision which proliferate in the contemporary environment. These are represented by apertures, screens and frames, implied or literal, which enact emotional tensions between what is visible and what is excluded. With these junctures in mind, Keegan describes the paintings as depicting, “dramatic states of immersion, absorption or alienation.” He develops the composition of each painting as he works. Editing them over a long period of time, their surfaces become highly textured. He says that this approach, “infuses the paintings with a psychological edge which evokes a certain clock-ticking anxiety and doubt.” Keegan attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions in New York, NY are Incoming, James Fuentes (2018); You decide to take a walk, On Stellar Rays (2016); and Total Recall, OLD ROOM (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum for American Art, New York, NY (2019); Eighteen Hundred Showers, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2018) and Gallery Four, Baltimore, MD (2017).