In a 2019 Artforum cover story, novelist and critic Gary Indiana describes McKinniss’s paintings as “a deft, saturnine, facetiously sincere autobiography of taste and tastelessness… suffused with pathos, even suffering, as well as flash and comic incongruity.” McKinniss, as both artist and spectator, channels the overstimulated, image-saturated experience of the digital age into paintings that are simultaneously lush and biting.

While he is often associated with depictions of celebrity and spectacle, McKinniss’s practice also engages deeply with art historical traditions. His recent work for TEFAF, Chrysanthemums (after Fantin-Latour), 2025, pays homage to 19th-century painter Henri Fantin-Latour, whose influence is central to McKinniss’s ongoing still-life and portrait series. Titles often bear the phrase “after Fantin-Latour,” reflecting not only reverence but also the artist’s characteristically self-aware humor: “I wish I could paint like the French hybrid post-Impressionist realist symbolist Henri Fantin-Latour,” McKinniss has said, “but I cannot, so I just copy his paintings.”

Through heightened contrasts of color and masterful attention to light and form, McKinniss bridges the aesthetics of past and present—marrying the refined techniques of historical painting with the seductive, often chaotic iconography of modern life.