Canvas Six (left) and Canvas Four (right)
Canvas Two (left) and Canvas Seven (right)
Lower body one, two, and three 2022
Canvas Six (left) and Canvas Four (right)
MK Thomson (b.2001) is an award-winning contemporary figurative oil painter from Ullapool, Scotland. She paints the human body with a focus on ambiguity, physicality, and monumentality. Her practice is inspired by the universality of embodiment and the enduring significance of oil painting as a tradition. As such, her paintings blend atemporal and unidentified figures with modes of expression that respond to, and at times distort, the tradition of Western academic realism
MK is fascinated by the contrast between the non-permanence of existence, the finite nature of physical being and the eternal accessibility of the body as an image. Conceptually, her artworks are as much about the human body as they are about painting itself. They reject the need for narrative structure, instead prioritising sensation, namely the visceral sensation of human physicality as it is translated through paint.
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The figures in her paintings manifest the body separated from the self. The abstraction or removal of hair and the underworked or obscured facial features reflect a desire to strip the body of its identity. Stripping context from both the bodies' identity and the paintings' circumstances creates a tone of ambiguity that defines her work. Ambiguity fosters the metamorphic, the transitional, and the unresolved Ultimately, beyond the fact that they reflect the human, her paintings exist in a realm of uncertainty because beyond the physical truth of existence, life is uncertain.
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Taking inspiration from Giorgio Agamben and Friedrich Nietzsche, MK’s current practice is concerned with contemporaneity and the untimely. She is particularly focused on how these concepts can relate to the anachronistic condition of figurative oil painting in present culture.
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In 2023 MK achieved a BA (Hons) First Class degree in Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), Dundee and was awarded the Graham Lang Prize for Excellence in Drawing and Painting. In 2024 she received the William S. Phillips award, which entails a full scholarship for artists working at an advanced level to undertake a Masters degree at DJCAD. MK is currently based in Dundee and pursuing a Masters in Fine Art. Her paintings are held in collections across the UK, Germany, and Australia and she has exhibited in multiple venues across the UK.
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