Medrie MacPhee is based in New York. She was born in Edmonton and attended NSCAD in the 1970s. She has exhibited in Canada and the US for over four decades. Museum collections include the Metropolitan Museum, NY; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection; the National Gallery of Canada; the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, the Palmer Museum of Art, PA; the Asheville Museum, NC; MacPhee is the recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize Awards, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Award. MacPhee is a fellow of The National Academy of Design and Emeritus Professor of Art, Bard College.
Medrie MacPhee
Medrie MacPhee is a senior Canadian painter based in New York. Her innovative approach to space, colour and form is widely admired and respected in both Canada and abroad. Over the years, her work has evolved from architectural landscapes to abstraction, with the concepts of construction, momentum, collapse and renewal remaining central to her practice. Recently, a significant shift in MacPhee's process occurred when she began adhering ordinary materials — clothing, zippers, buttons and fabric — to her canvases. The resulting chromatic patterns she creates using this framework are entirely abstract and yet reference their origins in the subtle presence of human-body derived shapes and contours.
MacPhee is also widely recognized for her works on paper, combinations of abstract motifs that create a unique visual language. Her current works are collages composed of acrylic transfer, pumice, transparent velum and oil stick.