And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens

The MAC Belfast presents a major exhibition of work by William McKeown, from 9 October 2025 to 4 January 2026.

William McKeown made paintings, drawings, prints and installations that captured the openness and life-enhancing power of nature. Guided by a belief in the primacy of feeling, his paintings often appeared at first to resemble objective minimalism or the monochrome. Yet they offered much more: nature as real and tangible, all around us, something to be touched and felt.

Each painting is slightly off square, undermining the perfection of geometry, and scaled roughly to the size of the human chest, as if mirroring the capacity of our lungs to breathe in air. Sometimes presented in ‘room installations’, his works act as windows out onto the world – an escape from the repression and mundanity of everyday life and into the lightness and expansiveness of the sky, using subtle gradations of tone to create moments of exquisite beauty and bliss.

Frequently using titles such as ‘Hope’ and ‘Freedom’, McKeown steered our attention to the air around us, capturing the feeling of our emergence into light and reminding us of our proximity to the infinite.

“Sometimes your being expands to take in and be taken in by nature. It’s like nature is something you can’t understand intellectually but is something you can feel part of...” William McKeown
 

William McKeown was born in Tyrone, 1962, and was living and working in Edinburgh at the time of his death on October 25, 2011.