The interdisciplinary practice of Esau McGhee (b. Philadelphia, PA) moves between collage and the sculptural, treating material as subject and structure. McGhee uses collage as both surface and form, allowing process to guide the work rather than imposing a fixed conceptual framework. Rooted in post-minimal and process-based traditions, the work foregrounds fragmentation, mark-making, and repetition as generative strategies.

These formal actions produce abstract, visceral narratives that resist stable representation. While traces of the human experience remain, the work moves beyond the body as a fixed site, instead engaging abstraction as a means to examine desire, ritual, and the systems that attempt to shape our collective experience. Working serially, McGhee emphasizes the relationship between part and whole, and the symbolic charge embedded in repetitive and obsessive action. By disrupting the traditional rectangle, the structural presence of the work creates depth and perceptual disorientation, offering an alternative to traditional representational modes.

McGhee received an MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory and Practice as well as a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.