Scottish performance artist and painter, born in Glagow. Studied at the Glasgow School of Art (1960-63) and at St. Martin's School of Art (1963-66), where he and others rebelled against what appeared to be the formalist academicism of his teachers, among whom were Anthony Caro and Phillip King. He held his first one-man show in 1969 at the Konrad Fischer Gallery, Düsseldorf. Several of his pieces are the records of ephemeral sculptures using materials such as water, along with performances of a generally satirical nature directed against the art world. Pose work for plinths 1 and 3 (1973) is a satire on the reclining sculptures immediately associated with the work of Henry Moore. The concept of pose that McLean considered inseparable from the way in which the artistic community functions, from which he felt evermore distant, became central to his work and was developed and satirized in various ways. From the mid-1970s, while continuing to mount occasional performances, McLean turned increasingly to painting, in a witty and subversive parody of current expressionist styles, and to ceramics.
