Self-Portrait With a Swollen Cheek

Self-Portrait With a Swollen CheekHand signed Acrylic, Emulsion and Ink On Board original by Duncan McAfee. Created as a response to collages of old photographs he crafted in his youth, Duncan McAfee considers his 2025 collection to be a collaboration with his younger self, introducing his gritty improvisational abstract style to personal, environmental and societal issues. With an incredible sense of depth which mirrors the texture of his collages, the artworks are initially painted

Hand-signed Acrylic, Emulsion and Ink On Board original by Duncan McAfee.

Created as a response to collages of old photographs he crafted in his youth, Duncan McAfee considers his 2025 collection to be a collaboration with his younger self, introducing his gritty improvisational abstract style to personal, environmental and societal issues.

With an incredible sense of depth which mirrors the texture of his collages, the artworks are initially painted in layers, after which McAfee defaces his work, ‘ruining’ the paintings with blocks of dark colour or random markings before fixing the destruction with a new layer of paint – challenging himself to work as intuitively as possible. His uniquely improvisational technique fuels his signature sense of chaos and disorder.

'I try to get as much contradiction in as possible. They’re bright, fun and messy.'

In the past, McAfee began each painting by throwing a glass of red wine at a blank canvas. Now, working with a longer lasting substrate he has created himself, McAfee uses the ‘wine’ as a finishing touch, honouring the roots of his creative process.

Taking the motifs of his Exploding Heads series a step further, McAfee creates a riotous and intense horde of domestic objects, body parts and facial features, representing modern day economic and political anxieties through a disorientating and distorted lens. Influenced by a wealth of sources, from the unsettling figurative artworks of Francis Bacon and George Condo t o newspaper cartoons, the artist builds a sense of impending doom with his visceral images by drawing on his own anxieties and experiences.

McAfee vehemently believes that it is impossible for him to set the meaning of the work. The viewer themselves, and the context in which they view the piece, completely alters the meaning – as McAfee says, 'it’s got nothing to do with the intentions of the artist.'

Find out more about McAfee's art here.