Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity's violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire's preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women's shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity. Maguire's most recent paintings directly confront issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. They are some of his most nuanced and ambitious to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins. This growing contrast between the seductive painterly aesthetic and the subject matter only adds to the potential impact of these formidable canvases. In 2018 Maguire released his newest publication that displays a substantial new artist monographm surveying his career to date. Maguire has shown extensively in Europe and the US, also participating in shows in Korea, China and Japan.
Read MoreRecent solo exhibitions include: WITNESS, Shirley Fiterman Art Centre at BMCC, City University of New York, New York, USA, (Winter 2020); War Changes Its Address, American University Museum, Washington DC, USA, (13 June/ 9 August 2020); War Changes Its Address, United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA, (10 February–21 February 2020); Scenes of Absence, Rubin Center, Texas University, TX, USA, (26 September–13 December 2019); Escenarios de ausencia, Art Museum Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, (20 September–24 November 2019); War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, (2018); Concerned, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2018) and the European Parliament, Brussels (2012). Recent group exhibitions include: Naked Truth, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, (2018); Demise, Cleveland University Art Gallery, Cleveland, OH, USA, (2018); The sea is the limit, York Art Gallery, York, UK, (2016); Conversations, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014) and Ni Una Mas, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA, (2010).
Maguire's work is represented in the collections of Irish Museum of Modern Art; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Museum of Fine Art Houston, Texas; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, The Netherlands; Alvar Alto Museum, Finland.
Text courtesy Kerlin Gallery.
