40’s

Bringing together works from the past two years, ’40’s’ unfolds in two parts, juxtaposing two distinct series of paintings. The exhibition deepens Mackay’s unapologetic engagement with longing, femininity, and desire, presenting, on the one hand, a series centred on the male body and, on the other, works shaped by the unstable life stage of the early forties—a condition heavily informed by popular culture, clichés, and social expectations. Across these works, Mackay seizes upon familiar codes of power, such as strength, vanity, aggression, and godlike idealisation. Rather than seeking fixed meaning, ’40’s’ opens through drift and instability, moving between figuration and abstraction, attraction and refusal.