Calm, 2025

Xanda McCagg  

Xanda McCagg is an American abstract artist who was born in 1959, she lives and works in the neighboorhood of Chelsea in New York. The artist obtained a Barchelor's degree in art education from the University of Boston. She also studied at the New York Studio School and at the Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, Maine, she then worked as a teacher at the New School of New York and at the Bronx Museum. She has done several residencies, including one at the Vermont Studio Center and another at the American Academy of Rome, Italy.

McCagg is inspired by human experiences, particularly by the behaviors that stem from human relationships. Cultural issues such as poverty, government, religion and war, cultural phenomena such as mythology and dichotomies like strenght and weakness are often represented in her pieces.

Having a classic training, McCagg evolved towards a style that abandons figuration to evoke the human essence. She creates her abstract compositions using a combination of oil paint, graphite and collage. Even if she started her career doing figurative paintings, she has given up this field to search for more intimate representations of the human essence. However, her work is influenced by classic elements such as line and space, which provide an aesthetic vocabulary to her compositions. The exploration of the different ways in wihch relationship can change is an integral part of her artistic process. Thanks to the expressive stratification of the impasto, and of delicate and rough lines, McCagg seeks to articulate her often subtle evolutions. Instead of planning precisely where will her compostion lead, she intuitively knows all along the process the minimun necesary to manifest the essence of what she calls "the thin line between perception and imagination of these relationships"

Jaquelyn Tuerk, a professor of art history at the Kean University in New Jersey, said about McCagg's work : "McCagg's images emanate peace, with lyrical, soft and complex ripples of unexpected interations...... the space opens to give the observer the sensation of walking in an alternative world of palimpsest forms where imagination defies perception."

Xanda McCagg has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in the United States as well as in Budapest, Hungary and Paris, France. Xanda McCagg's pieces are part of numerous private collections, as well as of corporate collections such as that of Alliance Capital Management.