Xanda McCagg
1959
(USA)
AMERICAN
Xanda McCagg is an American abstract artist who lives and works in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. A classically trained painter, she has evolved into a style that abandons figuration in search of evoking the human essence.
Education
McCagg earned her BFA in Art Education from Boston University. She has also studied at the New York Studio School and the Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, ME, and taught at the New School in New York and at the Bronx Museum. She has completed several fellowship and residencies, including at the Vermont Studio Center, The American Academy in Rome, Italy, The Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams MA, and at C.A.M.A.C in Marnay Sur Seine, France.
Technique
McCagg weaves traces of experience together into paintings that edge between abstraction and a suggestion of figuration. The resulting dialogue between form and content, shape and vivid color is an ever-evolving conversation.
In her recent work, McCagg has drawn from impressions from traveling and from art history, looming back as a way of making sense of the present. Beginning with a cross, she masks it onto the canvas as an understructure upon which to build. Gradually veils of paint cover and alter the vertical and horizontal lines, allowing the cross to take on a new meaning. Working with the notion of “Icon” as an iteration of her focus on relationships, McCagg assembles small, large, and pieced-together canvases as visual wholes that echo in the manner of icons or totems as metaphors.
Inspiration
Xanda McCagg’s paintings push and pull our perception through layers of distilled human experience. Using the language of line, color, and mark making, McCagg’s work comments on the dichotomies that shape our lives on both an intimate and global level. Observing the world around her, exploring the cause and effect of shifting relationships as they occur in nature and in humanity, McCagg creates compositions that speak to memory, metaphor, and perception....
Embodied in these paintings is the deep human need for hope so pronounced in these times. Connecting to the universality of art that communicates through the centuries, from one hand, to an eye, to the brain and back out, interpreted by each individual - that is the depth of understanding.
Collections
The work is well represented in private and corporate collections, such as Alliance Capital Management, New York, Posternak Blankstein & Lund LLP, Boston and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York and The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London Connecticut.
Exhibitions
Xanda McCagg has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as in Budapest, Hungary and Paris, France.
Galleries
Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence RI
Contemporary Gestural Abstraction At Your Fingertips
Unpremeditated spontaneity and unconstrained freedom most distinctly captured in the gestural abstraction matured along with the artist's fervent quest for freedom, authentic self, and a myriad of...
Read more
This Week's Pick of Artworks to Collect - Abstract Drawings!
An indelible dilemma survives our times: are drawings - and to which extent - artworks in their own right or do they belong to an exploratory and even auxiliary form as they are absorbed in larger...
Read more
Less Is More! Collect Your Minimal Abstract Art Here
Less is more, a popular aphorism by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, not only succinctly captured the essence of emerging minimalism, but inspired the movement that continues to evolve in a number of aes...
Read more
Celebrating Female Abstract Art!
While the contribution of female abstract artists was pivotal to the abstract art, their work was notoriously undervalued and lacked the recognition indisputably received by their male counterpart...
Read more
Ten Affordable Abstract Art Pieces to Get Under £1000
If you are on the lookout for exclusive and affordable abstract art, you are in the right place! IdeelArt brings quality and original abstract art from the artists' studio directly to you, seamles...
Read more
Blog Home Emma Kunz's Drawings, Between Spirituality and Abstraction
This Spring, Serpentine Gallery in London will open Emma Kunz - Visionary Drawings, the first exhibition of the work of Emma Kunz (1892–1963) in the United Kingdom. A Swiss-born Spiritualist, ...
Read more
The Glorious Austerity of Ben Nicholson
When Ben Nicholson died in 1982 at the age of 88, he left behind a troubled legacy in his homeland of England. On one hand, his abstract reliefs are considered by most British scholars to represen...
Read more
Hypnotic Nature of Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings
Sometimes nonessential elements of an artwork disrupt our ability to enjoy it. Maybe it’s the artwork’s value, the artist’s notoriety, the fact that the work’s owner won’t show it, or that we can’...
Read more
From pencil to ink, charcoal to pastel, drawings represent an important part of our offering at IdeelArt. But, what is drawing actually? Though most often associated with figurative artistic movem...
Read more
Abstract Art as a Style of Choice
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”-William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun The word contemporary refers to the now. But can we have multiple contemporaneties? Thanks to the legacy of artist...
Read more
Minimalism is an abstract art movement which emerged in America in the 1960’s, and which mostly refers to painting and sculpture. Minimalist pieces in no way attempt to represent external visual r...
Read more
