Tim Maguire’s paintings and prints are cinematic in scale and distinctive for their rich colouration and technical skill. Giant flowers and golden fruit resonate from ambiguous backgrounds. The work is sumptuous, romantic. Shaun Lakin argues that Maguire’s painting is ‘both historical and contemporary’. But that these modes ‘do not exactly co-exist …they rub up against each other.’
Read MoreMaguire uses digital photographs as source material for his oil paintings. He applies colour separation techniques not unlike those used in commercial printing. The distinction between the digital and the handcrafted is blurred. ‘Maguire’s surfaces hold these competing formalisms - of the Modernist canvas and the digital print - in close proximity …’
Shifting between abstraction (up close) and figuration (at a distance), Tim Maguire’s paintings are alive, fecund even, with dramatic tension.
Tim Maguire has exhibited widely both within Australia and throughout Europe since winning the Moet and Chandon Fellowship in 1993. His work has been seen recently in solo exhibitions at the John Curtin Gallery, Perth and Bendigo Art Gallery and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
Text courtesy Tolarno Galleries.
