About
MacKenzie’s process is intuitive and is driven by memory and feeling of place. She is interested in painting’s relationships to place and time, through the non-linear accumulation of imagery and forms. Compositional concerns such as relationships between colours, and the materiality of the paint, together with speed or slowness of marks are driving forces in her work.
Lynsey MacKenzie lives and works in Glasgow and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2019 with a first class BA (Hons) in Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Chronochromia’, The Briggait, Glasgow (2022); ‘HERE AND NOW’, SaltSpace, Glasgow (2020). Group exhibitions include ‘Platform: 2022’, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh (2022); ‘RSA Annual Exhibition’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2021, 2022); ‘Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibition’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2021); ‘Interactions of Colour’, Royal Glasgow Institute, Online (2021); ‘New Contemporaries’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2020). Recent awards include the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award, the RSA Latimer Award, the Wasps Award and the Tatha Gallery Award.
Lynsey MacKenzie lives and works in Glasgow and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2019 with a first class BA (Hons) in Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Chronochromia’, The Briggait, Glasgow (2022); ‘HERE AND NOW’, SaltSpace, Glasgow (2020). Group exhibitions include ‘Platform: 2022’, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh (2022); ‘RSA Annual Exhibition’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2021, 2022); ‘Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibition’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2021); ‘Interactions of Colour’, Royal Glasgow Institute, Online (2021); ‘New Contemporaries’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2020). Recent awards include the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award, the RSA Latimer Award, the Wasps Award and the Tatha Gallery Award.
Media and Publications
Platform 2022 Visual Description Tour, Edinburgh Art Festival, 22 September 2022
Audio described tour of Platform 2022. This tour was originally designed and delivered by and for people with visual impairments. This tour gives you a sense of the colours, textures, materials, and the spaces of this exhibition. Visual describer and artist, Julianna Capes, and artist, activist, and storyteller, Anne Dignan.
Hazy Dream of Translucence: Lynsey MacKenzie - The Skinny, 1 September 2022
Excerpt: "The work spans various timespans, both the chronological and the fleeting. There is an instilled sensation of an all-at-once-ness, where cessation of the physical boundary of self is replaced with an appreciation of the moment. Giving way to the ekstasis – simply meaning standing outside oneself – allows acceptance for the intuitive conscious body. This recognition for the moment is palpable in pleasingly titled works such as Musk Mallow and Tangled Grove to name a few." - Isla Valentine Wade
Strings Resume Dancing - MAP Magazine, September 2022
"I walk upstairs to Lynsey MacKenzie’s animated paintings, all of which leap from the pistachio cream walls. There are sweeping strokes upwards in ‘Daydreams’ (2022), echoing the importance of leaning, and having something or someone to lean on. The wooden frames holding up the canvases buttress the work to a structure of support—a kind of trellis. There remains a negotiation of boundaries, but MacKenzie’s work chooses dizzying enthusiasm as methodology. Here, painting is a verb akin to dancing; everything that happens seems to happen simultaneously, a delicious compost of moving parts." - Alice Hill-Woods
From Nope to She-Hulk: a complete guide to this week’s entertainment, The Guardian, 13 August 2022
"Lynsey MacKenzie’s abstract paintings are windswept and exhilarating, like a breath of cool Edinburgh air. They suggest land and sea and life." - Jonathan Jones
Chronochromia - a shade is a shade by Sara O'Brien, Wasps Studios, August 2022
"Sara was commissioned by Wasps to write a piece of text on the occasion of Chronochromia‘s opening. The brief for the style of writing was kept open, and Sara created a beautiful work of art writing located in Lynsey’s paintings. Sara visited Lynsey in her studio to speak about the influence of time and colour on her practice, and meditated on the body of paintings that make up the show before writing a shade is a shade. The text finds inspiration in the planes of Lynsey’s work, and complements the exhibition’s expanses of colour and cadence." - Wasps Studios
Excerpt: "Umbers, oranges, indigos, akin to the cloak they watch drift above them, cycling through chromatic flutterings, while they ponder the dual proximities of space." – Sara O’Brien
RSA New Contemporaries 2020 - The List, 24 February 2020
"... much of the work [this year] fits broadly into the categories of painting, print-making and sculpture for which these galleries were made. Paintings, like those by Emma-Louise Grady, Sam Renson and Lynsey MacKenzie look great in these airy spaces." - Susan Mansfield
RSA New Contemporaries 2020 Catalogue
"The large-scale, ambitious abstractions painted by Lynsey MacKenzie mesmerise the viewer with subtly shifting planes of colour. The play of the accidental against the deliberate, and the transparent against the opaque, contribute to the impact of these beguiling paintings." - Dr Gina Wall
Visual Arts Scotland - Curated Member Showcase, November 2019
"There is a great sense of generosity in the paintings of Lynsey MacKenzie. She doesn’t feel the need to hide much in the dialogue with us, the viewer. So as time is spent, she adds and shows the adding. That accumulative way of working is laid bare and seems to feed the language of the painting, so the process leads the image. It’s a satisfying thing as an observer to see that joy of material, especially when used so intelligently to make such beautifully balanced and nuanced painting." - Barry McGlashan
Critic's Choice - The Herald Magazine, 9 June 2019
"Lynsey MacKenzie has kept things simple with three big paintings illustrating confidence and freedom in her use of paint and colour." - Jan Patience
Glasgow School of Art Degree Show - Extract from The Afternoon Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 3 June 2019
"[...] Lynsey MacKenzie - she just had three big paintings, very colourful, very bold and free and, you know, sometimes less is more - she didn’t have anything else fancy in with it, she hadn’t made anything to complement the paintings. It was three big, cracking paintings, one called the Dear Green Place. I think she’s worth keeping an eye on.” - Jan Patience
Leith School of Art Summer Exhibition 2016 - Edinburgh Reporter, 27 June 2016
"Lynsey E MacKenzie, the worthy winner of this year’s LSA prize for painting, has produced two huge works, Span and Flux; each is a mixture of sharp geometric lines and softer shapes, whites, greys and yellows, as shafts of light move, emerge and disappear, reflections shimmer and evaporate. She is interested in ‘the depiction of light as an active, dynamic force, creating a sense of flux, movement, shifts in time, and transience of presence’. Lynsey, who will next year study at Glasgow School of Art, came to painting only after qualifying in law and working in theatre administration – from the sophistication of her work one would think she had spent years developing technique, and I have no doubt we will be seeing more of her." - Rosemary Kaye
Audio described tour of Platform 2022. This tour was originally designed and delivered by and for people with visual impairments. This tour gives you a sense of the colours, textures, materials, and the spaces of this exhibition. Visual describer and artist, Julianna Capes, and artist, activist, and storyteller, Anne Dignan.
Hazy Dream of Translucence: Lynsey MacKenzie - The Skinny, 1 September 2022
Excerpt: "The work spans various timespans, both the chronological and the fleeting. There is an instilled sensation of an all-at-once-ness, where cessation of the physical boundary of self is replaced with an appreciation of the moment. Giving way to the ekstasis – simply meaning standing outside oneself – allows acceptance for the intuitive conscious body. This recognition for the moment is palpable in pleasingly titled works such as Musk Mallow and Tangled Grove to name a few." - Isla Valentine Wade
Strings Resume Dancing - MAP Magazine, September 2022
"I walk upstairs to Lynsey MacKenzie’s animated paintings, all of which leap from the pistachio cream walls. There are sweeping strokes upwards in ‘Daydreams’ (2022), echoing the importance of leaning, and having something or someone to lean on. The wooden frames holding up the canvases buttress the work to a structure of support—a kind of trellis. There remains a negotiation of boundaries, but MacKenzie’s work chooses dizzying enthusiasm as methodology. Here, painting is a verb akin to dancing; everything that happens seems to happen simultaneously, a delicious compost of moving parts." - Alice Hill-Woods
From Nope to She-Hulk: a complete guide to this week’s entertainment, The Guardian, 13 August 2022
"Lynsey MacKenzie’s abstract paintings are windswept and exhilarating, like a breath of cool Edinburgh air. They suggest land and sea and life." - Jonathan Jones
Chronochromia - a shade is a shade by Sara O'Brien, Wasps Studios, August 2022
"Sara was commissioned by Wasps to write a piece of text on the occasion of Chronochromia‘s opening. The brief for the style of writing was kept open, and Sara created a beautiful work of art writing located in Lynsey’s paintings. Sara visited Lynsey in her studio to speak about the influence of time and colour on her practice, and meditated on the body of paintings that make up the show before writing a shade is a shade. The text finds inspiration in the planes of Lynsey’s work, and complements the exhibition’s expanses of colour and cadence." - Wasps Studios
Excerpt: "Umbers, oranges, indigos, akin to the cloak they watch drift above them, cycling through chromatic flutterings, while they ponder the dual proximities of space." – Sara O’Brien
RSA New Contemporaries 2020 - The List, 24 February 2020
"... much of the work [this year] fits broadly into the categories of painting, print-making and sculpture for which these galleries were made. Paintings, like those by Emma-Louise Grady, Sam Renson and Lynsey MacKenzie look great in these airy spaces." - Susan Mansfield
RSA New Contemporaries 2020 Catalogue
"The large-scale, ambitious abstractions painted by Lynsey MacKenzie mesmerise the viewer with subtly shifting planes of colour. The play of the accidental against the deliberate, and the transparent against the opaque, contribute to the impact of these beguiling paintings." - Dr Gina Wall
Visual Arts Scotland - Curated Member Showcase, November 2019
"There is a great sense of generosity in the paintings of Lynsey MacKenzie. She doesn’t feel the need to hide much in the dialogue with us, the viewer. So as time is spent, she adds and shows the adding. That accumulative way of working is laid bare and seems to feed the language of the painting, so the process leads the image. It’s a satisfying thing as an observer to see that joy of material, especially when used so intelligently to make such beautifully balanced and nuanced painting." - Barry McGlashan
Critic's Choice - The Herald Magazine, 9 June 2019
"Lynsey MacKenzie has kept things simple with three big paintings illustrating confidence and freedom in her use of paint and colour." - Jan Patience
Glasgow School of Art Degree Show - Extract from The Afternoon Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 3 June 2019
"[...] Lynsey MacKenzie - she just had three big paintings, very colourful, very bold and free and, you know, sometimes less is more - she didn’t have anything else fancy in with it, she hadn’t made anything to complement the paintings. It was three big, cracking paintings, one called the Dear Green Place. I think she’s worth keeping an eye on.” - Jan Patience
Leith School of Art Summer Exhibition 2016 - Edinburgh Reporter, 27 June 2016
"Lynsey E MacKenzie, the worthy winner of this year’s LSA prize for painting, has produced two huge works, Span and Flux; each is a mixture of sharp geometric lines and softer shapes, whites, greys and yellows, as shafts of light move, emerge and disappear, reflections shimmer and evaporate. She is interested in ‘the depiction of light as an active, dynamic force, creating a sense of flux, movement, shifts in time, and transience of presence’. Lynsey, who will next year study at Glasgow School of Art, came to painting only after qualifying in law and working in theatre administration – from the sophistication of her work one would think she had spent years developing technique, and I have no doubt we will be seeing more of her." - Rosemary Kaye