The Completionists Maureen Dougherty
Who are the enigmatic people gazing back from Maureen Dougherty’s canvases? They have already sized you up and found you wanting. Unabashed, occasionally depraved, these characters who live by appetite and sensuality are shot through with a joyous, at times defiant, air of freedom.
Dedicated to the figure of the collector, The Completionists centers on portraits completed by collections surrounding their subjects. A figure faces the viewer in the foreground with shelves accumulated behind them. A man is dwarfed by his trove of ceramics and sculptures. The pairing of collector and collection as a form of consumption is, in each case, candid, revelatory of a specific personality, kink, or genre.
In Mustard Collector (2024), a woman among mustard jars, draped in exotic fabric, looks directly into your eyes. An androgynous book collector, volumes meticulously arranged, simultaneously as sexless as sexy as the bookshelf behind them, stares you down from inside their own erudition in Sorbonne Book Collector (2025). Picasso Collector (2026), taking a more dialed-in perspective, centers around a platinum blonde in profile against a wall of ceramics, her hair sculpted into a weapon, the look of someone who has never second-guessed a purchase in her life.
The suite exhibited, repeatedly, casts an eye on France. First, through its proximity to Manet’s modern life settings, and the cabinet de curiosités tradition, whereby a collection itself serves as a portrait of its owner’s mind. Then, the pop-cultural. Bardot, the vedette in stilettos, presides over a shelf of Staffordshire dogs with the authority of someone incapable of second-guessing a purchase, an intersection of sensuality, celebrity, and power, that most iconic of French bodies commandeering a resolutely English tradition in Bardot collects Staffordshire (2025). Then, an older French tradition of Carnivalesque art forms. An ancient, chaotic current – Rabelais, and Bakhtin’s celebrated reading of him in Rabelais and His World (1965), that vision of the body, human and animal, as something that “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world,” defined not by its contours but by its hungers, its openings, its refusal of propriety.
Trained in colorist principles and narrative painting at the Studio School, Dougherty spent fifteen years working in abstraction before her more recent return to figuration. The fluidity of her broad brush strokes, her treatment of light and sea, her palette recall Matisse, the painter of joy’s interiors and odalisques, claustrophobic abundance, interplay between abstraction and figuration. Dougherty’s painting of the human form is equally parsed into geometries as it is intuitive vis-à-vis traditions and the sensuality it decisively broadcasts as inextricable from form.
Parallels with cabaret-infused Weimar portraiture, too, are easily drawn – and Dougherty, for whom sensuality and politics can coexist on a canvas, is clear-eyed about why. The artist believes our moment calls for “antifascist degenerate art” – an echo in 2026 of genres and artworks the Third Reich sought to destroy. In this way, Otto Dix, his depictions of cultural freedom and satirical bite, feels close to Dougherty. So too does Jacqueline de Jong, the ferociously underestimated Dutch artist who split with Guy Debord because she refused to excise pleasure, eroticism, and painterly jouissance from political life.
In her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous issued the imperative “Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” Dougherty, who describes her art as “an invitation to feel before we think,” animates something of that call in each subject, and each odd bedfellow, she depicts. This is what twentieth-century French philosophy called violence faite à la pensée, a violence done to thought, exalting rather than bruising, surprising, interrupting, provoking. The approach drives Untitled (Nude), in which a pale, slender figure perched on the wine-red fiddlehead of a boat, his bare body, against a dark background, catching the light. The pose carries a Classical directness, the body offered without apology. In a second maritime work, Meissen Sailor sailing away (2026), a porcelain-like figure in a white sailor suit grips the rigging of a boat, a stiff, rosy Meissen figurine against a loose, breathing seascape. Is he a collectible? A collector? What can be felt about these characters, their trajectories? In posing these questions to their observers, both nude and sailor, like everyone/thing in The Completionists, recast lines between person and object, appetites and consumption, collector and the collected.