Niall McClelland, who lives and works in Toronto, is a multidisciplinary Canadian artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, print, and installation. He spent large portions of his youth in Northern Ireland, an experience that continues to shape the raw energy and urgency in his work. Over the past decade, his art has been exhibited in solo and group shows across North America and internationally, known for its fearless material experimentation and restless vitality. McClelland often draws from everyday culture, including zines, photocopies, found objects, and punk iconography, pushing these sources into works that blur the line between chaos and control. His projects channel the immediacy of DIY aesthetics while engaging with larger conversations around abstraction, authorship, and the noise of contemporary life.

Artist Statement: TasteMakers Billboard Series
For his new body of work, McClelland has taken an unexpected turn: transforming restaurant take-out menus into grounds for gestural abstraction. Using layers of markers, ink, and paint, he builds frenetic compositions that recall Jackson Pollock’s action painting while pulling equally from urban graffiti traditions and the abrasive visual language of punk.
In these works, the everyday utility of a menu collides with high-energy expressionism. The familiar grid of listed dishes becomes nearly obliterated by furious marks, yet still hovers beneath the surface, visible, fragmented, and ghostlike. The tension between legibility and illegibility, order and disorder, reflects McClelland’s ongoing fascination with cultural detritus and the ways meaning is both constructed and broken down in the world around us.
The piece presented here embodies this new direction: a charged field of black and red scrawls that feels both anarchic and intentional, oscillating between the urgency of a tag on a city wall and the layered depth of modernist abstraction. By reimagining the humble restaurant menu as an arena for painterly aggression and experimentation, McClelland collapses the distance between the everyday and the avant-garde.

For more information:
Clint Roenisch Gallery / IG: https://www.instagram.com/niall_mcclelland/