John Maclean

Margot Samel is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by London-based artist John Maclean (b. 1972, Perth, Scotland). This is the artist's first solo presentation with the gallery, following his New York debut at White Columns in 2022. The landscape paintings of John Maclean are made in rhythmic tandem with the other mediums he is known for, primarily filmmaking, screenwriting, and music. His images are taken from various sources: postcards, photographs, and collected imagery. They are cropped, refined, and begin as photoreal recreations. He turns these to ‘ghost images’ by thickly applying watercolors atop them, sanding down the pigment, and then reapplying, repeating this process again and again to quickly fine- tune the surfaces until they are varnished over. The medium takes on lively patterns of its own natural origins, like in Mine (2026) where we see liquid technicolor skies. The quick routine production of the beautiful and the surreal becomes a means to explore habituated ways of viewing and making. In Cliff Wood (2026), the foreground of an idyllic mountain range is cut through with fluorescent green expressions. In Red Tree Lake (2026), a pond is depicted, glittering and reflecting the sweeping forest around it. Trunks, branches, and leaves abound, rendered in a frenzy of staccato brushstrokes and rich acidic colors. Like psychedelic rock in the 1970s that stretched and toyed with traditional compositional elements to explore the spiritual dimensions of music, Maclean’s palette and approach across his works set a surreal tone to how these landscapes expand beyond depiction. These elements convey less the literal reality of the world, and more a feeling of being within it. Process is important to Maclean’s overall practice and he stays very true to the method of making that he has established in both subject and approach. He cites the automations and systemic seriality of Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol; their generative systems of painting are like rituals. As one routinely returns to something–as in ritual–discovery of the self and the world become more familiar, more habitual. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel described this as making oneself at home in the world. When one is at home in the world, habitual generation gives way to experimentation without restraint. This is seen with the newest paintings in the exhibition, such as Clearing (2026) and Two Trees (2026). Here, Maclean works on a larger scale than before. Everything previously determined at a smaller scale grows: the boards, the brushes used, the movement, and the compositions all expand in their rich, frenetic, environmental scenes. They spread limbs across larger planes and scatter the natural world through denser brush or wider, open spaces. Maclean’s ritual-relay in the studio aids creative generation in his narrative cinematic practice elsewhere. The works are humble, unpretentious, joyous and reliable in subject matter and serve as a foil to his politically potent films. For the paintings in the exhibition, this means that a viewer is positioned somewhere between intimate woodland pastures or endless molten skies, and a surreal degree of playful narrative mystery within the artist’s broader repertoire. —Emily Small John Maclean (b. 1972, Perth, Scotland) is a London-based artist. He holds a BA in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art (1994) and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (1996). Maclean has had solo exhibitions at Margot Samel, New York, NY (2026); The Approach, London, UK (2024, 2023); Place des Vosges, Paris, France (2023); and White Columns, New York, NY (2022). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Jarvis & Werner, New York, NY (2025); Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY (2025); French Riviera Gallery, London, UK (2023, 2022, 2019); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK (2004); Cabinet Gallery, London, UK (2000, 1999); Gavin Brown Enterprise, New York, NY (1999); and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria (1999). He is included in an uncoming group exhibition at Ingleby gallery in Edinburgh in June 2026.