Ally McIntyre is a Canadian artist currently based in London, UK. After graduating in Painting and Sculpture from University of Alberta in 2013 she exhibited in several exhibitions including at Latitude53, NEXTFEST Emerging Artists Festival, and the Works international Art and Design Festival with a major sculptural installation in Edmonton’s City Hall. She then completed the MA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths University of London. In 2014, she and Gabriel Molina, a Chelsea College of Art graduate, collaborated on a 440 ft mural for her hometown. She was awarded the Jealous Prize 2014/2015 and Hix award 2015.
Ally McIntyre’s work rebels against the constraints the art canon has imposed on painting. She reinvents her subjects through large dimensions, bright colours, unconventional pairing of mixed media and styles. Bold and assertive, her work stands up to the prevalent association of large-scale art with the male artist. Confident brush strokes envelop glimpses of realism and dissolve faces into playful combinations of dream-like colour, line and glitter. Ally’s work is an amalgamation of various genres across history; faux-naive, realism, kitsch, expressionism, and cartoon. The subject and narrative of her new work often has to do with the structure of hierarchy in culture, art, human-animal relations, and somehow circumventing or looking at it in a new away, that can place importance on a subject that may otherwise not be considered honourable or iconic.