McKenzie, Dougal (2011) 'Hot and Cool', Exhibition of Paintings

This exhibition was McKenzie’s second solo outing with the gallery, and consisted of four large scale paintings, two smaller paintings and a combine painting incorporating a dress garment and drawings. The title of the exhibition ‘Hot and Cool’ played with a number of ideas, referring to both the form and content of the paintings. It played on the colour temperatures in the work, as well as wider narrative themes to do with media and history. The work had a continued interest in the possibilities of history as a subject in painting, and how this relates to our world of proliferating screen imagery. The title and works in the exhibition also made reference to the terms ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ as defined by Marshall McLuhan in denoting various types of image and information communications generally, and particularly within the new ‘electronic age’. Another theme was German designer Otl Aicher’s geometric designs for the 1972 Munich Olympics, which used a sliding scale of warm and cool colours. Another key reference was the distance runner Lasse Viren, an iconic figure at both the ’72 and ’76 Games. The over-arching theme of the exhibition was an investigation into how paintings can still effectively co-habit the world of RGB screen imagery; an extension of this idea was that the painting’s ground could provide a type of pixel structure on which the image could exist. The exhibition was a proposal that painting, as a medium today, can potentially carry as many meaningful layers of narrative in dealing with history’s events as the screen might do. The exhibition was reviewed in the Summer 2011 edition of the international art journal Artforum. This not only placed McKenzie’s work within a contemporary international context, but also brought the work to the attention of a wider international audience.