Megan Rooney

Megan Rooney was born in South Africa in 1985 and spent part of her childhood in Brazil before her family settled in Canada, where she holds her nationality. She completed a BA at the University of Toronto and an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2011, and has been based in London ever since. Her practice moves across painting, installation, performance, sculpture, and poetry, often combining these disciplines within a single body of work, with large-scale, layered, gestural abstraction as her most recognizable signature.

Her institutional profile grew steadily through the late 2010s, including a solo presentation at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Fire on the Mountain (2019), and inclusion in the Lyon Biennale the same year. In 2020 she presented Hush Sky Murmur Hole, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, followed by Green, I Want You Green at the Salzburger Kunstverein in 2020 to 2021. In 2022 she was invited to install a gallery of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris for Fugues in Colour, and in 2024 she presented Echoes and Hours, a solo exhibition at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. She continues to live and work in London.

Rooney has drawn consistent critical attention for treating painting as an immersive, physical environment rather than a fixed object. Ocula and Whitewall both describe her large, mural-scale works as built from layered color, gesture, and language, moving fluidly between abstraction and narrative, and her exhibitions are frequently framed around atmosphere, gesture, and accumulated time rather than a single fixed image.

Rooney's auction market has been thin but has moved sharply. Her previous auction high was a modest USD 29,800 (GBP 22,860) for Two Dreams, One for Now, One for Later (2016), sold at Phillips London. That figure was superseded on 25 June 2026, when The Living Sky (2025 to 2026) sold for USD 405,400 (GBP 307,200) at Sotheby's London, more than seven times its low estimate. It is worth noting that The Living Sky was donated by the artist and sold in a benefit auction, Artists for Kettle's Yard, rather than in an ordinary owner-to-buyer resale, a context that matters when reading the result as a market signal rather than a straightforward index of demand.

Rooney has no catalogue raisonne, and her auction history to date consists of only a small number of public sales, so any single result, including her current record, should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable index of value. Her institutional momentum, museum acquisitions, and current representation by Thaddaeus Ropac are the strongest available signals of her standing, while the limited depth of her secondary market is the main reason to treat headline auction figures carefully.