Megan Rooney’s luminous atlas of paint and time at West Bund

Megan Rooney’s ‘That Sky (Atlas)’, measuring five metres across, unfolds like a visual palimpsest where gesture and colour accumulate into something approaching rapture. Verdigris and teal brushstrokes drift across the canvas, interrupted by sudden flashes of ochre, blue and golden yellow that seem to float between layers of paint, pastel and oil stick. At Thaddaeus Ropac’s booth at West Bund Art & Design, the work commands the space with the quiet authority of something genuinely felt.

For Rooney, painting emerges as a conversation between intention and accident, between the deliberate application of pigment and its deliberate erasure. Her process unfolds through accumulation and subtraction, surfaces built up with acrylic, oil and pastel only to be sanded back, revealing the traces of what lay beneath. Each canvas becomes a temporal object, a record of decisions made and unmade, of the physical exchange between artist and material that leaves the work breathing with time itself.

The verdigris tones suggest oxidation and weathering, while the teal speaks to something almost atmospheric, as if she has translated sky or water into pure chromatic sensation. The ochre and golden yellow punctuate the composition with moments of warmth that feel earned rather than decorative. Beneath these colours, linear marks emerge and disappear, gestures that anchor the all over composition without imposing order upon it.

Rooney’s current exhibition, ‘A New Life Force’, runs at Micaʻs in Valletta, Malta until 31 January 2027, presenting a new body of work developed through the same philosophy of patient, physical engagement with surface and pigment. West Bund Art & Design runs until 15 November 2026 in Shanghai.

Imagery courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac (@thaddaeusropac).