Alexandra McGowan: Embraced by Sunlight

Megan Mulrooney is thrilled to present Embraced by Sunlight, our first exhibition with Virginia based artist Alexandra McGowan. The exhibition will be on view from May 16 – June 20, 2026.

McGowan’s canvases bleed, pulse, and blend; their marks scintillate and vibrate and morph and meld. Using watered down acrylic on super absorbent cotton bedsheets, she layers staccato dapples of color and wider washes of paint repeatedly across her surfaces. Her color palettes in each work are refined, but throughout the exhibition range from the dark blues of the deep ocean to the fluorescent yellows and pinks of more celestial spheres. While each work is entirely abstract, they recall perceptual experiences enabled by natural phenomena, from light reflecting off a water’s surface to the shifting sun’s rays, peaking through overlapping foliage.

These abstracted representations of light are as rooted in nature as they are in the body and home. The intimacy of these works begins with McGowan’s chosen medium. She writes: “Over the past two years, I have been developing an abstract painting technique which utilizes stretched cotton bedsheets, fluid acrylic paint and chalk pastel. My use of bed sheets references my relationship with my bed as a symbol of rest, safety, and queer love. Engaging with fluid acrylic paints, I work instinctively, responding in collaboration with the mediums and universal forces which inform my next gesture.” The softness of the paintings’ surfaces – so soft one could, in their earlier form, lay on them – is palpable, and impart a tenderness to her compositions which at times can otherwise feel frenetic, filled with hundreds of marks whirling into psychedelic coils.

McGowan turns a meditative eye on the natural world, homing in on moments of color and light until the familiar becomes abstract. “I am drawn to the parallels between my human body and the natural environment. I notice the subtleties in nature—specifically the flow of water and softness of shadows. I utilize these moments in my work to translate a delicate, shifting temperament and reflect on the subtleties within my own human energy and experience.”

McGowan's work enters into a rich art historical conversation: her stained, fluid surfaces recall the Color Field painters, particularly Helen Frankenthaler's pioneering soak technique, in which paint becomes inseparable from the fabric it inhabits. McGowan's meditative attention to natural phenomena and the subtle emotional registers they carry also draws comparisons to Agnes Martin, whose quiet, repetitive marks sought not to depict nature but to evoke the feeling of it, like an embrace by light.

There is something compulsive and generative in the serial nature of McGowan’s work, each work in a series titled numerically. Each painting is catalogued, a discrete session emerging from the same materials and gestures, yet arriving at a conclusion entirely its own. Within a consistent set of rules, McGowan flows freely, and it is this tension that gives the body of work its cumulative power.

Alexandra McGowan (b. 2001, Providence, RI; Lives and works in Richmond, VA) holds a BFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been included in group shows at Megan Mulrooney, CA; Capital One Arts, Henrico, VA; Bond Millen Gallery, Richmond, VA, among others. She has had work featured in New American Paintings Issue 178, and Flat Rate Contemporary's FRC19. She held a Residency at VisArts Studio in Richmond, VA.