Hot new artist: Danielle Mckinney, painter of women’s intimacy

By Anya Harrison.

Published on 21 June 2025. Updated on 7 July 2025.

Danielle Mckinney’s intimate and tender paintings

A photographer by training, New Yorker Danielle Mckinney didn’t take up painting till COVID. “One can sense a photographic approach to light in her small paintings,” explains art advisor Marie-Sophie Eiché‑Demester, who discovered the young painter’s carefully composed, almost cinematic work three years ago at Marianne Boesky’s and Max Hetzler’s. For her, “Danielle Mckinney poetically conveys simple moments of everyday life, combining things like smoking a cigarette with moments of reverie and intimacy in her portrayals of young, often nude women.” Like artists Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Kerry James Marshall, who have given visibility to Black bodies by rendering them in oils, that most traditional of mediums, Mckinney’s protagonists are exclusively Black women depicted alone in a variety of domestic interiors – a bedroom, a living room, wrapped in a bath towel, lounging on a bed or sofa – which the artist creates using images gleaned from magazines or social media. The thick brushstrokes and smooth, creamy surfaces make this languor all the more palpable.

A successful painter

“Galleries have long waiting lists these days,” Marie-Sophie Eiché-Demester continues, “but it seems pretty obvious that many museums and private collectors have fallen for these irresistible little paintings and are interested in them as ensembles.” Mckinney’s works have recently been shown in Copenhagen (Kunsthal, 2024), Turin (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 2023), and as part of thematic exhibitions such as When We See Us: A Century of Pan-African Figurative Painting, which is currently on view at Bozar Brussels (until August 10th).

Danielle Mckinney is represented by the Marianne Boesky and Max Hetzler galleries.