Brian McNulty: A Practice of Survival in the Age of Alienation

A visual and narrative exploration of anxiety, displacement, and endurance. Brian McNulty’s work inhabits the space between isolation and belonging, where survival becomes a quiet, ongoing practice.

Between Alienation and Survival

Brian McNulty’s work exists in the pause between reaction and collapse, the moment where humor flickers just before despair fully sets in. His images feel at once intimate and systemic, personal yet unmistakably political. They do not attempt to soothe or resolve. Instead, they remain present with discomfort, mapping emotional states that are often edited out of public life.

At the heart of McNulty’s practice is a quiet insistence that alienation is not an abstract condition, but a lived experience shaped by culture, power, mental health, and memory. His paintings and printed works operate as visual documents of endurance, records of what it means to stay present inside anxiety rather than flee from it.

Early Expression and Creative Necessity

Creativity entered McNulty’s life early, not as a discipline but as an instinct. In childhood, drawing and painting were tools of expression, ways of translating internal experience into something visible and tangible. These early gestures were less about aesthetics and more about communication, about finding language before words felt sufficient. By adolescence, music became his primary creative outlet. Writing, playing, and performing shifted creativity from pastime to necessity. Art was no longer recreational. It became structural, something that held emotional weight and psychological function. This period established a pattern that would follow him into adulthood: creativity as a means of survival rather than self-branding.

That foundation continues to inform his work today. Even as mediums change, the impulse remains the same: to externalize interior states and to give form to what resists articulation.

Design, Control, and the Limits of the Screen

Professionally, McNulty’s creative life took shape through art direction and graphic design. These disciplines sharpened his sense of composition, symbolism, and visual economy, keeping him deeply engaged with image-making and conceptual systems. Design offered structure, clarity, and control, qualities that often feel necessary in a world marked by uncertainty.

Over time, however, the limits of screen-based work became apparent. The physical distance between creator and object, between hand and material, left something unresolved. During a multi-year period in the Bay Area, McNulty began pushing his practice beyond the digital realm, reintroducing tactility through screen printing.

This return to physical process marked a subtle but important shift. Ink, surface, pressure, and imperfection re-entered the equation, allowing chance and material resistance to shape the work. The body became involved again, not just the eye.

Painting as Survival, Not Intention

In March 2023, painting emerged not as a strategic pivot, but as an act of necessity. During a period of severe depression and ongoing panic disorder, McNulty turned to canvas as a way to cope, to stay alive, focused, and grounded. Painting functioned less as ambition and more as intervention.

These early works were not made for exhibition. They were private, urgent, and emotionally raw. Over time, however, a language began to form, one that carried forward the emotional truth of that moment while developing formal coherence. What began as coping evolved into practice. What began as survival became sustained inquiry.

The fine art work McNulty has produced since carries the imprint of that origin. Even as the work grows more resolved, it never loses the sense of vulnerability from which it emerged.

Alienation, Liminality, and Cultural Symbols

Alienation is not merely a theme in McNulty’s work. It is the framework through which everything else is filtered. His images occupy liminal zones, spaces between belonging and isolation, humor and despair, safety and threat. These are spaces where certainty dissolves and identity feels provisional.

Pop cultural references and symbolic imagery appear frequently, not as nostalgia but as shared language. By using familiar visual cues, McNulty creates points of access, entryways into conversations about mental health, power, and survival. The recognizable becomes destabilized, revealing the anxiety embedded beneath cultural surfaces.

His work explores how personal distress intersects with larger political and social systems. Anxiety is never treated as purely individual. It is shown as something shaped, amplified, and often produced by the structures we inhabit.

Community as Quiet Collaboration

While McNulty does not currently collaborate on finished artworks, collaboration remains central to his practice through community. Relationships with curators, organizers, and fellow artists form an ecosystem of exchange, support, and shared momentum.

These collaborations are not transactional. They unfold organically through trust and mutual respect. Exhibitions become collective moments rather than isolated achievements, spaces where dialogue matters as much as display.

Recent group exhibitions in New York City and Brooklyn include shows with Kinship and Hechyeomoyeo, fall exhibitions with Hechyeomoyeo, Harmony with Guerilla Art Shows at Triangle Loft, and multiple exhibitions with Ovono. Beyond traditional gallery contexts, McNulty has completed public-facing installations with Welling Walls in Astoria, NY, as well as pop-up exhibitions with Mesh, allowing the work to exist in everyday, unscripted encounters.

Expanding the Form: Image, Text, and Narrative

McNulty’s practice continues to expand beyond the canvas. Alongside ongoing painting series and forthcoming exhibitions, he recently released his first illustrated long-form narrative, UnEntitled: Between the Panic, the Pacific, and the Safety Net.

The project merges personal writing with visual work, collapsing distinctions between memoir and artwork, image and text. It reflects a growing interest in narrative as a container, one that allows complexity, contradiction, and emotional duration. Rather than offering resolution, the story sits with uncertainty, tracing movement through panic, geography, and fragile stability.

This expansion feels less like a departure and more like a natural evolution, another way of holding experiences that resist singular form.

Presence Without Resolution

Brian McNulty’s work resists closure. It does not aim to heal, reassure, or provide answers. Instead, it insists on presence, on staying with discomfort long enough to recognize it as shared.

In a cultural moment that often prioritizes optimism, clarity, and consumption, his work remains unresolved by choice. It honors the grey areas, the pauses, the emotional states that are neither triumphant nor defeated. Alienation, in McNulty’s hands, becomes something communal rather than isolating, named, seen, and quietly held.

Where to Experience the Work

Brian McNulty’s work can be viewed at alienation.art, with select publications and releases available at brianmcnulty.shop. Paintings exhibited in galleries are available for purchase through the exhibiting venues. Ongoing projects, exhibition updates, and new releases are shared on Instagram at @brianmcnulty.