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| Felicity Harley-McGowan | |
|---|---|
| Name | Felicity Harley-McGowan |
| Birth date | 1979 |
| Birth place | Cambridge, England |
| Occupation | Painter, Installation artist, Curator |
| Years active | 2001–present |
| Nationality | British |
Felicity Harley-McGowan is a contemporary British painter and installation artist known for large-scale mixed-media canvases and immersive site-specific works. Her practice intersects exhibition-making, curatorial projects, and collaboration with institutions across Europe and North America. Harley-McGowan's work engages with archival materials, urban histories, and botanical iconography through layered paint, collage, and textile techniques.
Born in Cambridge, England, Harley-McGowan studied at the Royal College of Art and completed postgraduate work at the Slade School of Fine Art before undertaking residencies at the British School at Rome and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. During her formative years she trained under tutors affiliated with the Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and she participated in exchange programs with the École des Beaux-Arts and the Central Saint Martins. Her early influences included archival projects at the Imperial War Museum and botanical research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Harley-McGowan's professional career began with solo exhibitions at regional venues such as the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the Whitechapel Gallery, followed by international shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Haus der Kunst. She has collaborated with curators from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada, and participated in biennials including the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Istanbul Biennial. Her studio practice expanded to curatorial projects at the South London Gallery and the Hayward Gallery, and she served on panels for the Arts Council England and the Cheltenham Science Festival.
Major works include the series "Archival Flora" exhibited at the Tate Modern and the installation "Cartography of Memory" commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries and later shown at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Centre Pompidou. Other notable exhibitions were "Surface Histories" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Thresholds" at the Royal Academy of Arts, with site-specific commissions for the V&A Dundee and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Her touring retrospective, organized by the National Portrait Gallery in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, mapped collaborations with the British Council and the Asia Art Archive.
Harley-McGowan's style synthesizes painting, collage, and textile practice drawing on precedents from J. M. W. Turner, Francis Bacon, Eva Hesse, and Anselm Kiefer. Her work references archival strategies used by the Imperial War Museum and photo-collage techniques associated with Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters, while engaging with botanical illustration traditions from John James Audubon and scientific illustration collections at the Natural History Museum, London. Critics have compared her layering methods to those of Gerhard Richter and her installation scale to projects at the Guggenheim Museum. She cites research residencies at the Warburg Institute and collaborations with scholars from the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Wellcome Trust as formative.
Harley-McGowan has received awards including the Turner Prize longlisting, the Prinz Eugen Medal (honorary citation), the Jerwood Painting Prize, and grants from the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and was awarded an artist's residency by the DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her projects have been funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European Cultural Foundation, and she has been an invited lecturer at Yale University, Columbia University, and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Harley-McGowan lives and works between London and Edinburgh and has taught at Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Edinburgh. Her legacy includes contributions to public collections such as the Tate Collection, the British Council Collection, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has mentored emerging artists through programs at the New Contemporaries and the British School at Rome, and her archival donations are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Category:British painters