Ranny Macdonald

At the onset of 2025, General Assembly is pleased to present Vital. Engaging with art historical dialogues about pictorial and visual language in our contemporary moment, Vital seeks to address questions about how value is communicated in today’s increasingly digital culture. General Assembly seeks to investigate how artists both new to General Assembly and those the gallery has an established relationship with communicate value in their work. What is the language which we communicate through today? Is that language necessarily communicated through painting? Does today’s art translate as “vital”?

Ranny Macdonald (b.1994) is a painter, musician, and sometime environmental activist based in London. Whether by seeing through the eyes of the city’s dogs and pigeons, or in still life paintings of anthropomorphic flowers, his works create a space to consider our relationship with ‘Nature’ or the more-than-human world. Beyond their visual language, which draws from early Pixar as much as the history of painting, they embody their subject physically through the use of sustainably sourced and up-cycled materials including found wood and pigments made from discarded metal-oxides, crushed bricks, and earths. Since his recent graduation from the Royal Drawing School’s post-graduate programme Ranny has exhibited internationally, including group shows with Incubator, Marlborough Gallery, Melzi Fine Art and South Parade. In 2023 he was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, which showed at Camden Art Centre, London and Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool.