Michael McGrath is a Rhinebeck, New York–based artist whose work focuses on moments when the familiar begins to feel unsettled. His paintings and mixed media pieces explore shifting landscapes, quiet searches, and the weight of both minor and larger unseen forces.
Michael McGrath (b. 1977) lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York. His work explores the tension between calm and unease in everyday life, drawing on natural phenomena, personal memory, and close observation of his surroundings. It lingers in moments when the familiar begins to shift, when something subtle feels off and harder to name. Recent work reflects on living simply while sensing underlying instability, where images hold both quiet wonder and a steady, low tension.
Across painting, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media, open-ended scenes unfold without fixed narratives. Figures move through changing landscapes, often alongside animals, engaged in quiet searches or exchanges that remain unresolved. Gestures, light, and repeated forms suggest forms of communication that sit just outside language, where meaning is sensed rather than stated. A sensitivity to scale runs throughout, where small, immediate concerns exist alongside more distant and diffuse pressures, allowing minor threats to carry unexpected weight.
His work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, Brussels, Copenhagen, Taipei, Seoul, Shanghai, and Mexico.