Leena McCall is a British figurative painter whose work centres women’s bodies, labour, and visibility. Working primarily through portraiture and the figure, she uses classical painting techniques to confront contemporary discomfort around female presence, autonomy, and refusal.
Her work first gained international attention through debates around censorship and the regulation of women’s bodies, and has since been widely exhibited and discussed in international media. McCall’s paintings position women as subjects rather than symbols, resisting visual traditions that render the female body either consumable or invisible.
Alongside this, her practice engages with themes of motherhood, interruption, ageing, and unpaid labour — experiences that profoundly shape women’s lives while remaining culturally undervalued. Painting becomes a means of making this labour visible: slow, embodied, and resistant to erasure.
McCall’s work is held in the permanent collection of Museu de l’Art Prohibit, Barcelona. She lives and works in the UK and accepts a limited number of commissions.