Danielle Mckinney’s new exhibition Second Wind, her first UK solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, is simply stunning! Known for her intimate, luminous interiors, the artist steps into new territory here, testing the edges of her own practice while keeping her vibrant palette that defines her work.

Figures emerge: women at rest, women in thought, women suspended in the unspoken. Cigarettes glow, fingernails flash, a lamp softens the room with a hum of light. Her protagonists, always Black women, are painted not as objects of observation but as free agents of their own interior worlds. Beautiful.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1981 and now based in Jersey City, Mckinney has been steadily carving her place in the contemporary landscape. Her work has already entered major institutional collections from Vienna, Shanghai to Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthal in Copenhagen and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin have further established her as a vital voice of her generation.

The brushstrokes here are more visceral, the compositions less tightly bound. Curtains whip, rugs dissolve, walls thrum with colour. The environments, she says, “pulse with abstraction”, as if the very air around her subjects is restless with energy. The contrast between the stillness of the figures and the turbulence of their surroundings creates a friction that is electric.

Colour, too, has shifted. Deep browns and shadows remain, but they are punctured by sudden, glowing bursts: a flash of auburn cushion, flowers blazing orange, a dressing gown turned wild chartreuse impasto.

Mckinney cites Vuillard and Sickert as influences, and their echoes are visible in her handling of paint and interiors. Yet her vision is distinctly her own, anchored in the visibility of Black women as subjects of contemplation. With references to Matisse this time; in the past Picasso.

The show is on view at Galerie Max Hetzler in London until 1st November.

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