Jack McGarrity

Jack McGarrity trained at the Glasgow School of Art, close to where he grew up in the West of Scotland, before moving to London to study at the Royal Drawing School. In 2018 he attended a two month residency at the Museo del Prado in Madrid having been awarded the Richard Ford Award and a year later spent three months in Florence for the John Kinross Award.

Equally concerned with both quotidian mundanity and the heightened reality of film and comic books, McGarrity creates new narratives that explore notions of the absurd, stillness and alienation in the modern world. Embodying a wry sense of humour, McGarrity’s collaged enactments present scenarios that are, at times, idiosyncratic and mordant whilst retaining an essential sentimentality.

McGarrity joined the Messums Emerging Talents Programme with an exhibition at our Wiltshire Gallery in July 2021. Since 2016 we have supported an annual emerging talent programme that champions artists at the beginning of their career. The programme has seen four years of burgeoning talent grow into established creative strength with Messums and elsewhere.