“I don’t think I’m that interesting,” Sam McKinniss said.
He was seated at a kitchen table at his home in northwest Connecticut one recent afternoon. Sunlight streaming through windows haloed his head. Neatly arranged on a plate were cucumber sandwiches he had prepared for lunch with a guest. Precise ridges were peeled into each slice.
“I don’t know how much people need to know about me,” said Mr. McKinniss, who, for the benefit of the uninitiated, is one of the most talked-about artists of his generation.
At 40, he’s a breakout figure, a painter who has established himself not only as a central proponent of contemporary portraiture but also a standard-bearer for figuration sourced almost exclusively from the internet. That this mediagenic young artist is also a darling of both the art and fashion press is no coincidence.
With paintings priced from $75,000 to $250,000, his shows sell out routinely. Writers and photographers stan him. In an Artforum review, the acidulous novelist and essayist Gary Indiana wrote in admiration of Mr. McKinniss that he imbued portraits of subjects like Britney Spears, Jennifer Lawrence, Lil Nas X and Tammy Wynette with their “due grandeur.”
GQ profiled him using the mash note as a format. The author of a Vogue piece described Mr. McKinnis’s house as a “magical, maximalist retreat” before running out of superlatives and quoting his Los Angeles art dealer, David Kordansky, who described it as an “amalgamation of ornate boredom.”
In reality, it is a clapboard box perched on a wooded hillside. Mr. McKinniss acquired it during the pandemic with the first real money he had made from selling his work after years of toiling away in a semi-industrial space in Brooklyn.
“I was sick of Williamsburg,” he said.
So he went house-hunting in Litchfield County, a rural area less than an hour from the part of suburban Connecticut where he had been raised, and yet worlds away from it.
Kent is home to a private boarding school, a covered bridge and lots of quietly rich people. The philanthropist and art collector Agnes Gund lived there on a 252-acre farm. “We didn’t know her, but we saw her around,” Mr. McKinniss said.
The house he shares with his partner, the writer Michael Londres, sits on a modest lot at the end of an unpaved drive. The previous owner was a flipper who had bought it from a hoarder. It took 15 dumpster loads to clear away the trash before the place could be fumigated and offered for sale.
Now it’s a tidy box, with a bed in the sunroom and walls lacquered the colors of paste jewels. Everywhere you look there are works by artist friends — a Duncan Hannah portrait, a ceramic book cover by the Los Angeles artist Seth Bogart, an early Anna Weyant. Arranged with precision on a built-in cupboard is so much antique transferware that Mr. McKinniss had to put his eBay browsing on hold.
“Ornate boredom” may not make sense in describing the house. Yet it’s an apt way of thinking about the relationship Mr. McKinniss has with the visual detritus from which he makes his art. It is the rare article or review of his work that omits the fact that he paints not from life but from internet-harvested JPEGs.
Dipping his hands into the ever-flowing online slipstream, he comes up with his source material. Most recently this resulted in the paintings exhibited in his show, “Law and Order,” which runs through Nov. 22 at Deitch Projects in Soho.
Hanging in the vast gallery space are paintings small and large depicting lawbreakers, law enforcers, celebrities from both the A and D lists as well as, anomalously, Flaco the owl and a Highland bull that briefly became a local celebrity in Connecticut when it broke out of confinement and took to the road. Near the front desk, there is a small landscape painting showing a compound that, as it happens, is an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.
“Are the paintings good?” a critic for ArtNews asked in an ultimately positive review of the exhibition.
“People used to complain — though they called it critique — if a painting didn’t feel ‘honest,’” Mr. McKinniss said, referring to the early days of his career, when he was sometimes taken to task for relying on digital imagery. “Painters don’t reveal themselves. It’s not a process of revealing.”
Born in Minnesota, the third of four children of an evangelical reverend and a mother who managed the house, Mr. McKinniss was raised in Hartford County, Conn., where his parents still live. “My father’s a preacher,” he told this reporter, who had noted his commanding presentation as a speaker at a memorial in January for Mr. Indiana that was held at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, which is in the East Village of Manhattan. “I know how to hold a room.”
Mr. McKinniss took art classes in high school and earned a scholarship to the Hartford Art School. After graduation, he moved to Boston, where he worked a variety of odd jobs. “I drove a flower truck,” he said. “I worked in a bookstore.”
In those days, he painted portraits of his friends that were heavily influenced by Jack Pierson, Nan Goldin and others from a loosely affiliated group of artists who met in Boston in the late ’70s and early ’80s and came to be known as the “Boston School.”
Eventually, though, Mr. McKinniss began to bypass live subjects in favor of the celebrities and other meme-worthy figures that glut our social media feeds and waking thoughts — characters about whom it is not emotionally plausible to have anything resembling an “honest” response.
Take, for instance, a dominating image from “Law and Order.’’
The portrait is of Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the United Healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson. Based on a photo snapped by a photographer for The New York Times when Mr. Mangione was being escorted to a courthouse by police officers, it can be seen as narratively freighted — provided one’s memory of current events extends as far back as 2024 — or else judged in purely formalist terms.
“His painting is very subtle,” the art critic David Rimanelli said of Mr. McKinniss’s work. “These are not empty, high-dollar images of famous people and their high points and, particularly, their lows.”
For Michael Ovitz, the art collector and former Creative Artists Agency head, Mr. McKinniss has established himself as a “meaningful cultural figure.”
“Sam is an artist who documents his time,’’ Mr. Ovitz said.
In that sense, said Jeffrey Deitch, Mr. McKinniss’s work might be likened to that of the Impressionist master Édouard Manet. “Manet was also a painter of modern life,” he said by phone from the Art Basel art fair in Paris. “Law and Order,” he added, can be viewed as a “storyboard of contemporary unreality.”
Think Manet, if Manet were a courtroom artist for CNN.
A three-minute walk from Mr. McKinniss’s house stands his studio, a one-time garage. Notably spare, it featured low utility shelving, taborets crammed with tubes of oil paint, a caterer’s folding table and a mini-fridge with a bumper sticker reading “My Other Car is a Chamberlain.” A single canvas hung on a wall spattered with thousands of test daubs and brushstrokes that come together in a way that called to mind the American abstract expressionist Sam Francis.
“I think you’ll probably recognize the subject,” Mr. McKinniss said, referring to the large rectangular portrait of a dark-haired woman with an enigmatic expression and wearing an ethereal white dress that resembled Mormon temple garments.
The work in progress depicted Emily Bode Aujla, the founder of the cult fashion label Bode. It was one of Mr. McKinniss’s rare commissions. Like all of his paintings, it was culled from an internet image of Ms. Bode Aujla taken on the night she received the American Men’s Wear Designer of the Year award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2022, her second consecutive win.
“Sam’s work seems very meta, but in fact it’s not,” Ms. Bode Aujla said by phone from her house in northwest Connecticut. “Combing through images is not the point.”
What, then, is?
“The craft comes first,” she said. “You can’t take that out of the conversation. Sam’s work is about the actual act of painting — the materials he’s chosen to use, the history of painting, the history of icons and the many different narratives that splinter off from that.”
To hear Mr. McKinniss tell it, the countless hours he spends mining visual data are not spent in search of anything specific — just the reverse. Like Warhol, Rauschenberg, John Cage and other 20th-century artists who could be seen as his progenitors, he finds equilibrium by steadying himself against a ceaseless current of the random.
“I’m a very nervous person,” Mr. McKinniss said. “Everything makes me nervous. Art for me is a way of organizing chaotic life experience. It is a disciplining force for the unruly.”
Guy Trebay is a reporter for the Style section of The Times, writing about the intersections of style, culture, art and fashion.
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