margaret maclean

to hell and back

september 19 - october 24, 2026

margaret maclean, Who'll Build A Pyre For Goody, 2026

induction gallery is pleased to present to hell and back, an exhibition of new work by new york city-based artist margaret maclean.
this is the artist’s first solo show in los angeles and marks a new chapter for the gallery.

Margaret Maclean paints from a liminal state between waking life and dreams — figuration and dissolution—a world of bodily urgency perpetually slipping in and out of focus. Somewhere between corporeal insistence and perceptual instability, the artist's gestural hand and fluidity of working in oil conjures a resistance of coherence: figures recognizably human but never quite stable: flesh bleeding into atmosphere, faces and expressions half-formed, identities in flux.

With a confidence, oddity, and sense of restless energy, Maclean strips her palette to mimic atmospheric and psychologically loaded states of mind — immersive, slightly toxic, and alive. There is a tenderness, a refusal, and an uncertainty that finds its way to the surface in Maclean's paintings — one of its own truth and understanding. Formally, Maclean's canvases enact a deliberate destabilization of art-historical inheritance. References to notable compositional structures— the maternal grouping, the ascendant figure, the shared gaze skyward — are cited and simultaneously unraveled; iconography hollowed out from within. Anatomy is treated as an inference;: limbs elongate and double back on themselves, faces arrive underdetermined or partially erased, and in the exhibition's most abstracted works, the figure recedes entirely into chromatic incident — passages of pigment that reveal ambiguously, as flesh, weather, and wound. A contradiction of fixed subject, but rather functioning as a threshold—a place where recognition gives way to sensation.

Maclean’s palette throughout is restrained and all the while charged: desaturated, faintly toxic, at once atmospheric and visceral, evoking states of heightened or destabilized consciousness rather than describing them directly. Her paintings resist closure by design. Working at a scale that insists on bodily presence, Maclean paints with a directness that recalls the Old Masters even as she works against their resolution: her surfaces stay visibly wet, her forms visibly in process, so the paintings feel less like finished statements than states caught mid-transformation. It is this suspended quality — neither fully awake nor fully dreaming, neither wholly figure nor wholly field — that gives the work its particular charge.