With an interest in the mechanics of meaning-making and storytelling, McNamee-Tweed’s intimately-scaled ceramic paintings offer glimpses of subjects from the human to the animal to the inanimate. The vignettes often deliver moments of tender drama, with both pathos and humour, revealing fragments of a wider narrative while focusing on an instance of existential disquiet, incidental poignancy, or confounding delight. Anchored squarely in the tradition of painting, the wall-hanging works are composed of home-mixed clay bodies and glazes, including materials dug up near his home in North Carolina, a locale known for its rich clay history. Themes in McNamee-Tweed’s most recent work include the natural world, everyday objects, the margins of civilisation, and indeed the tradition of image and object making. Some of the stoneware slabs depict ceramic vases with scenes rendered upon them, referencing the three-dimensionality most commonly associated with the medium. The artist also regularly takes the studio for a subject: walls and table-tops filled with papers, tools, and artworks in progress, the objects and images accumulating in candid conversation.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed is based in Durham, North Carolina. He received a BFA from New York University and an MA and MFA from The University of Iowa. McNamee-Tweed has exhibited internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Cob Gallery, London, UK (forthcoming 2022); Fiction Workshop, Steve Turner, Los Angeles, US (2022); Time in the Time of Time, L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain (2022); With Objects from Victoria & Albert, Slow Install, London, UK (2022); Moon Over Math Town, Harper’s, New York, NY (2020); Already Not Yet, Shrine Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Handmade Books, The Menil Collection Books, Houston, TX (2016).
McNamee-Tweed has participated in group shows in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Australia, Iceland, Greece, and the UK. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Mildred Pelzer Grant, the Willhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, The Iowa Arts Fellowship, and the Montello Foundation Fellowship. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Glasstire, and Hyperallergic, among others.
Upcoming projects include solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Chatanooga, Tennessee and The Greenville County Musuem of Art in Greenville, South Carolina.