Mary Keen

Artist Statement

After a twenty year hiatus, I returned to painting in 2022. I had questions I couldn’t ignore, chief among them was “What is beauty, and why does it still matter?”

My recent early work was intuitive and abstract, driven by the conversation among forms, color, and surface. But abstraction alone could not express what I needed to say. So I introduced the figure—faces, bodies, fragments—and with that shift came the work's true subject: the psychological interior, the weight of past trauma, and the relentless cultural pressure on women to conform to a standard of appearance that is both constructed and punishing.

Beauty remains the question at the center of my practice. Not as an ideal to be achieved, but as a contested, unstable territory—one that my paintings enter through the body, through distortion, and through the willingness to let what is raw and difficult be visible on the surface.