Featuring wall paintings that extend across the gallery, the works bring to the fore the artist’s studio and the acts of painting and looking. McDonald reflects on the nature of creativity, while playfully reconfiguring pictorial space.

Celebrating often overlooked, everyday experiences, the ballooning and overlapping heads of McDonald’s figures suggest a joyful, communal consciousness. While some works move towards complete abstraction, these are mediated by the paintings-within-paintings that allow him greater freedom to explore abstract mark-making. Heightened by his use of bright colour, the works traverse the boundaries between genres. Over more than two decades, McDonald has developed a distinct painting language that remains remarkably consistent while continuing to expand its possibilities.

McDonald previously created a large-scale billboard installation at Southwark Station as part of Art on the Underground in 2009. Other wall-based works include the participatory immersive painting Disco (2011) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and a wall painting at the Miyako City Tokyo hotel in 2019.

“As painting is often a solitary activity, I enjoy working away from canvas and paper and exploring social spaces. This often leads to meaningful encounters which can provoke conversation and inspire future paintings. My Disco installation at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa was an 80-metre immersive wall painting wrapped around the gallery; the space was transformed into a shared communal place, much like a Renaissance church or a prehistoric cave.” - Peter McDonald

Peter McDonald was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1973 and currently lives and works between London and Tokyo. Recent solo exhibitions include Cocktails, Gallery Side 2, Tokyo (2024); Kate MacGarry, London (2021); Sampo, Gallery Side 2 / void+, Tokyo (2021); This, that and the other, Dio Horia, Greece (2018); Winnebago, Carpets, Onsen, Potter, Daiwa Foundation, London (2013) and Visitor, the culmination of a year-long residency at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2011-12).

Group exhibitions include Ukiyo-e In Play, Tokyo National Museum (2025); 100 Hooks, Blunk Space, Point Reyes, CA, USA (2023); Weightless, Mieke Van Schaijk, The Netherlands (2019); Museum of Together, Spiral Building, Tokyo (2017); Roppongi Art Night, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2016) and Making & Unmaking, Camden Arts Centre, London (2016). McDonald was awarded the Lucid Art Residency at Gordon Onslow Ford House, California in 2025. He was appointed a short-term Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford in 2022, and previously held a fellowship at the British School at Rome in 2017. In 2008, he received the John Moores Painting Prize.

Courtesy Kate MacGarry.