Brian Maguire

Essays by

Gavin Delahunty Ed Vulliamy Thomas McEvilley Donald Kuspit Extended captions by

Ed Vulliamy

Published by

Fergus McCaffrey Kerlin Gallery

For Lara Elisabeth

6 Foreword

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A Critical Representational Art: The Paintings of Brian Maguire

GAVIN DELAHUNTY

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From His Own Eyes: A Message of War and Struggle

ED VULLIAMY

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Brian Maguire at the XXIV São Paulo Bienal

THOMAS MCEVILLEY

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Brian Maguire DONALD KUSPIT

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Selected Chronology

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Public Collections

239

Author Biographies

Foreword

Brian Maguire is an artist of singular yet expansive vision: an activist, a correspondent, and a voice for dispossessed and marginalized individuals often considered dispensable by the rest of society. Since the onset of his professional career four decades ago, Maguire has been an instigator of numerous interactive projects with prisoners, refugees, and survivors; the artist’s practice is inseparable from his commitment to the community with whom he feels in service, navigating an often precarious exchange subject to the scrutiny of the public opinion under which it must operate.

It would not have been possible to reflect on a visual study of this matter without invaluable insight from curator Gavin Delahunty, who has managed to capture the larger historical perspective, as well as nuanced character, of the artist’s work; or the empathetic intuition offered by journalist Ed Vulliamy, whose own war reporting mirrors so much of Maguire’s investigations, and vice versa. The artist and galleries are grateful to Donald Kuspit, who generously agreed to the revival of an important essay on Maguire from 1988, and we thank Thomas McEvilley in memoriam, through Joyce Burstein, for graciously allowing us to include the writer’s 1998 text, “Brian Maguire at the XXIV Sao Paulo Bienal.”

Gratitude goes out to the staff of Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery, especially Rosa Abbott, Elly Collins, Bríd McCarthy, and Lee Welch, in addition to the book’s team at Fergus McCaffrey, New York: Geanna Barlaam, Valentine de Badereau, Rose Leadem, and Clara Nguyen. The artist would also like to express special thanks to Michael Feeney and Michael Traynor, Dublin; Paul Heary, Dublin; Colm Lynagh, Clones; and Richard Morgan, Paris.

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To survey the breadth of this decades-long vocation, and capture the determined gestures—not just in Maguire’s signature paint and charcoal but in billboard, film, and publication form—this book, Brian Maguire, is the result of a collective calling that for the first time has brought together images and texts spanning the period from 1981 through 2018. This would not have been possible without the intricate editing supervision of Richard Slovak, the tireless eye and proficient expertise of Tony Waddingham, and, not least, the artist, Brian Maguire, himself.

Fergus McCaffrey and Allyson Spellacy Fergus McCaffrey, New York David Fitzgerald, Darragh Hogan, and John Kennedy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin October 2018

GAVIN DELAHUNTY

A Critical Representational Art: The Paintings of Brian Maguire Brian Maguire’s Aleppo 4 (2017; p. 35) is a harrowing landscape painting, a nightmarish image of a city street devastated by war. It depicts a nameless boulevard whose identity has been obliterated through sustained bombing attacks, the hollow remains of its buildings twisted into one another in a final attempt to remain standing. The palette of black, white, and gray is like a perpetual shadow has been cast in which sit dotted spots of green, brown, and terracotta that serve as a cruel memento of life as it once existed on this street. It is a painful reminder of the relentlessness of war, exacerbated in the picture by the clear blue sky, the ghostly outline of a tree, and the almost complete absence of the street itself, which is rendered with loose watery drips.1 Significantly, the source image for this painting is not one of the hundreds of photographs that have been published or exhibited since 2011 narrating the ongoing Syrian civil war— images that remind us of the wretchedness of the situation in Aleppo. The image was not clipped, copied, or grabbed from a photojournalistic source; instead, Maguire took the photograph himself during a ten-day visit to the war-torn city in 2017. During the visit, “Maguire took photographs and did workshops with children. He talked to those still living in a city extensively reduced to rubble.” 2 This deliberate immersion in a conflict zone is somewhat unusual in today’s world of easily accessible imagery. A risky strategy, it tells us something about how Maguire gathers information and the importance of still photography in the production of his work. This is not your typical studio-based painting practice, nor does it fall within the tradition of the appointed war artist. For Maguire, the camera’s mechanical recording is the sober lens through which his work can materialize. His synthesis of photography, social engagement, and painting is key when building a critical understanding of his art, which hinges upon its polarization between tool and artwork, between the functional and the aesthetic.

In his 1976 manifesto “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary,” Allan Sekula called for “a political economy, a sociology, and a non-formalist semiotics of media” that could provide the framework for “a critical

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representational art, an art that points openly to the social world and to possibilities of concrete social transformation.” 3 Sekula’s career-long pursuit is relevant to Maguire in that both artists insist “on the viability of realism,” but only insofar as they contradict its supposed neutral objectivity. Both Maguire and Sekula believe that the representation of certain types of labor and the marginalized in society is vanishing, and that their disappearance stems from Western visual cultures’ own investment in the various fantasies of a postindustrial and post-working-class world.4 In other words—as Thomas McEvilley noted with regard to Maguire’s work in 1998—it is an attempt “to integrate art more fully into life or vice versa, to overcome the breach between art and life that had been nurtured for so long by the aesthetic and spiritual view of art, the view that it dealt with otherworldly ideals rather than with the plain stuff of everyday life.” 5 Maguire was born in 1951 in County Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland, to a Northern Irish family. In the early years of the Troubles, he joined the leftist Official Republican Movement, from which the militant Provisionals split in 1969.6 In 1979, shortly after the publication of Sekula’s polemic, Maguire started to paint. Initially, he painted autobiographical scenes based on memories from his years of socialist republican activity. It took more than a decade for Maguire to paint himself out of this corner. The urgency to exorcise these memories was a necessary rite of passage. It allowed Maguire to take a step back from a curative need to paint to more objective observations of his personal history.

Take, for example, Irish Landscape (1996; p. 173), which depicts a beautiful panorama of rural Ireland with rolling hills, green grass, and blue sky. The bulk of the painting, however, consists of a carefully buried assault rifle just below the surface of this bucolic setting. This subterranean view is presented as a cross section, revealing this hidden weapon in vertical profile. This type of firearm was commonly used by the Irish Republican Army and often buried prior to and after use as a method of hiding evidence. The proportion of the painting dedicated to harmony versus the proportion dedicated to the threat of violence speaks to the extent to which the history of violence

Maguire’s studio in north Paris, 2017

in Ireland lingers in the consciousness of the nation, close to its surface. It is striking that Maguire chose the medium of painting to address such challenging subject matter, since “in terms of the breach between art and life, painting seemed the worst offender. It was the medium that was historically most complicit with illusion and deception. . . . Through the 1970s painting occupied an outcast role and was forced into a kind of exile.” 7 Maguire seems to have intentionally returned to this pariah as his chosen medium, in an attempt to renew it—not simply as a traditional medium but as a conceptually informed practice. For Maguire, however, painting by itself was not enough anymore; he made up for its deficiencies by developing a working method whose ambition was to “attain

art that lives on the intimacy of life itself.” 8 He found this intimacy in what one of his exhibition catalogues described as “various incarcerated groups on the island of Ireland, from mental hospitals to prisons.” 9 In what became an almost four-decade-long exploration, Maguire’s initial focus and geographic interest widened to embrace the disenfranchised and the dispossessed in São Paulo’s favelas, Nairobi’s slums, and Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez.

In 1998, Maguire represented Ireland at the XXIV São Paulo Bienal. As part of his contribution, he arranged to spend eight weeks working in one of the favelas’ cultural centers, whose mission is to encourage art and theater appreciation in the neighborhood children. At the Centro Cultural,

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Maguire sought out those children, visiting their homes and meeting with their parents. He began producing their portraits in charcoal (pp. 152–55), and in the Bienal exhibition he combined them with portraits based on photographs of convicts published in a local newspaper (pp. 160–63). This juxtaposition encourages us to draw parallels between the subjects—in particular, how his portraits of the economically and educationally deprived children (only one of the forty children attended school) seemed in some way to anticipate their appearance as adults in the newspaper. His decision to paint the criminals was to “rehumanize and revitalize the individual portrayed.” 10 He had already spent twelve years teaching art to convicts in Irish prisons. Carrying out this work, he was always taken by the basic humanity of the men.

He registered the same humanity in the faces of the Brazilian prisoners. He was now tracing the seed of this attribute in the selfless faces of some of the favelas’ condemned youth whose identity was being socially and systemically misdirected in a worrying cycle.

Maguire’s investment in and relationship to his subjects is a closeness forged out of an ideological exchange that then manifests itself in a painting to produce meaning.

Maguire knows that any meaning is contingent, not fixed, but if he approaches the act of painting from a position of concrete social relations, he can shift it, even for himself, beyond a purely expressive act. While the impulse to create is ever present for Maguire, he expresses a certain hostility toward the act of painting itself. There is rawness in the technical qualities of Maguire’s paintings. This quality lies somewhere between Naive art, the CoBrA movement, and neo-Expressionism, positioning him, as McEvilley observes, as “almost an outsider . . . fully cognisant of art history and the contemporary issues concerning art practice and still (from some inner refusal to allow oneself to be shaped by it) remain outside.” 11 But in line with Sekula, he is careful not to let “the referential function collapse into the expressive function . . . separating it from the social conditions of its making.” 12 There is a tension in the work that arises out of his acute awareness of his privileged subjectivity as the artist, an autonomy that has

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Elizabeth with her portrait, favela Vila Prudente, 1998

been systemically denied by his subjects. In other words, the paintings symbolize the inequalities inherent in a consumerist economy. This may seem contradictory; however, it is only from this basis that Maguire can build an oppositional art that openly points to the social realities in the work and to the possibility of achieving an art that goes beyond spectacle and voyeurism and instead toward what elicits dialogue and critical understanding. The power of Maguire’s art has to do with this indeterminacy of reading, the way the paintings enhance one another despite their contradiction. In his insistence on “subject,” he preserves his paintings as instruments for their social and psychological truths.

Maguire’s paintings present life as a daily struggle against inequality and violence. For example, the Mexican city of Juárez has acted as a strategic route for the trafficking of

drugs into the United States for more than a decade, making it one of the most fraught places in the world. Maguire has continually visited Juárez since 2009. In 2015, it was the subject of a solo show entitled The Absence of Justice Demands This Act. The exhibited paintings recorded and displayed a violence befitting their subject. Several titles were borrowed from the French term nature morte (pp. 71–77), while others were more explicitly labeled Massacre and reproduced images of corpses, decapitations, and severed limbs. The Known Dead (2015; p. 61) is a particularly brutal painting from this series.

Five dead bodies lay face down in a snow-white landscape.

Their arrangement—lying side by side, clustered intimately together, lifeless limbs slumped one over another—has a dark, performative quality. It is a violent spectacle that signals the assailant’s disregard for human life. Troublingly, as the viewer’s eye rests into the picture, the bodies tend to blend into one to create a purely formal, chromatic rupture in the otherwise large white expanse. It is a brilliant technique that uses the application of paint as a metaphorical wound on the canvas to give emphasis to the painting’s narrative. Read in these terms, the ashen backdrop transforms into flesh and the five victims coalesce to form a laceration on its surface. The Known Dead combines subject, process, and form in a set of mutual relations and discursive configurations with potent psychological penetration.

This series grew out of an earlier effort by Maguire to keep alive the memory of hundreds of women—reportedly, fourteen hundred since 1994—who have been violently murdered in Juárez, in what is called feminocidio: the phenomenon of female homicides in the city. Maguire spent four years embedded in Juárez, grappling with this shocking statistic, pacing “the same streets that the victims walked, to visit with their families, to speak with them in cramped kitchens and sitting rooms and, ultimately, to paint portraits of the missing women of Juárez from careworn family snapshots.” 13 Brenda Berenice Castillo García (2011; p. 91) is one such portrait. The mostly black-and-white canvas captures the youthful beauty of Castillo García without any unnecessary glamour. In a tragic way, Maguire’s casual painting style

suits the teenager. At seventeen, Castillo García was still very much unformed, her entire life ahead of her. Maguire’s unpretentious approach to this tragedy made it legible and logical to the victim’s family and friends with an emotional depth that is both potent and profound.

Maguire is an important forerunner in a renewed engagement in art that examines social and cultural contexts beyond the confines of the institutional art world. It is a shift being signaled by a number of contemporary artists whose overtly ideological positions support the belief that awareness can be raised despite the context of an ever-increasing corporatization of culture. Instead of exclusively referring to the formal qualities of their work for understanding, these artists harness the power of engagement, in a belief in dialogue. This subject-led form of creativity rejects the tradition of the aloof, objectifying eye of the artist in favor of a creativity based on exchange that emphasizes discovery through a lived experience.

Maguire’s decision to immerse himself in a particular context resonates with other socially engaged practices that do not necessarily result in the production of paintings.

In 2012, Aliza Nisenbaum began working with Immigrant Movement International (IMI), a project initiated by the artist Tania Bruguera in Queens, New York. Its mission statement describes IMI as part community space, part think tank, part resource center, and part educational platform, designed to help immigrants to the United States.14 Nisenbaum’s contribution, at first, was to teach an English-language class using art. As she became increasingly involved in the lives of her students, she began to ask them to sit for portraits. Like Nisenbaum’s, Maguire’s practice is not only one that gathers information visually but one that relies on speaking and reflection before execution. In this sense, their work bears out the philosophical ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, who has written, “The basic difference is between a mode of thought which tries to gather all things around the mind, or self, of the thinker, and an externally orientated mode which attempts to penetrate into what is radically other than the mind that is thinking it.” 15 Interacting in this way avoids codependency

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and maintains the integrity of both parties. In this way, Maguire confronts modernism’s insistence on the autonomy of the artist and the work of art, its radical separation from the culture of everyday life, and its programmatic distance from political, economic, and social concerns. Maguire might argue that modernism’s ambitious but increasingly hermetic standpoint is what has forced art into power systems, as only a select elite can understand these systems. Yet he does not entirely refute the history of painting, since certain codes within its language are required so that he can penetrate those power structures.

Maguire’s challenge to himself of representing violence traverses the centuries since Rubens’s, Goya’s, and Picasso’s portrayals of the horrors of war. However, his attempt to reckon with the troubled history of particular places has more in common with the politics of portrayal as evidenced in the techniques of contemporary painters such as Julie Mehretu.

Mehretu’s Epigraph, Damascus (2016) is a monumental six-part print that, along with sister works such as Conjured Parts (Epigraph), Aleppo (2016) and Conjured Parts (Syria), Aleppo and Damascus (2016), has been described by artist Glenn Ligon as having “a gray sobriety.” 16 Epigraph, Damascus is not a graphic representation of Damascus but, as its title suggests, is an impression of the multilayered history of this location, and Mehretu’s response to the civil war that has been raging in Syria. From a distance, Epigraph, Damascus resembles an Abstract Expressionist painting, but it was in fact produced via a complex printing process that prioritizes precision over immediacy and gesture. Buried beneath the surface shapes and gestures is a series of identifiable line structures, linear fragments of buildings. The buildings are in parts and appear to have been disassembled before being reassembled in a manner that suggests they have undergone some sort of seismic shift. This alteration is amplified when one notices the sextet is made of up twelve separate plates, with a visible seam running horizontally through the center of each part.

Determined by the size of the printing plates, these breaks in the work’s surface make visible the production process while simultaneously analogizing the political tensions and physical

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fragmentation of a conflict zone. Albeit in very different ways, Maguire and Mehretu fuse the history of modernist painting with contemporary geopolitical concerns.

The challenges to Maguire’s innately humanist approach are perhaps evident; aestheticized renderings of violent imagery often move uncomfortably between the subject and the artist, who assumes the role of the victim, the sufferer, and the voice of moral outrage. Only the most oblique reading can be constructed. Are the figures in The Known Dead the good guys or bad guys? Why were they executed? If these are the “known,” how many dead remain unidentified?

The human content of the work becomes valued for both humane and voyeuristic reasons, and yet their story is virtually unknowable. On the one hand, the image presents information about obvious events; on the other, little can be known, and whatever has happened has happened. Perhaps the question we are overlooking here is that of the intended audience for Maguire’s paintings.

We are assuming that Maguire’s desired audience is the liberal elite with their impotent empathy, yet with an appetite for this sort of imagery. It is evident that Maguire is not interested in a romantic, sanitized, or sentimentalized image of warfare. Who wants to live with a painting of a decapitated gang member or a successful suicide attempt?

Of all of the legitimizing arguments that might encourage us to value Maguire’s paintings, the most important is audience: whom is he making his paintings for? Once this connection is made, their irreverent qualities take on a new meaning.

Maguire’s insistence on brutal reality is a repudiation of sorts, a backhanded two-finger gesture to established codes of artist-consumer conventions. The paintings are a shock to that system. Maguire is not prepared to dismiss painting as having no moral effect. More than a representation of a brutal event, Maguire is asking fundamental questions: What is art for? Who is art for? What can it accomplish? Although he has been painting since the late 1970s, Maguire’s fusion of ethical and aesthetic concerns has particular urgency in the present moment.

NOTES

1 The Aleppo Paintings were presented as part of the exhibition Brian Maguire, War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, January 26–May 7, 2018.

2 Cristín Leach, “Brian Maguire: War Changes Its Address: The Aleppo Paintings,” Sunday Times (London), February 4, 2018, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brian -maguire-war-changes-its-address-the-aleppo -paintings-337rgfdwg.

3 Sekula quoted in Marie Muracciole and Benjamin J. Young, “Editors’ Introduction: Allan Sekula and the Traffic in Photographs,” special issue, Grey Room, no. 55 (Spring 2014): 6–15.

4 Bill Roberts, “Production in View: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism,” Tate Papers, no. 18 (Autumn 2012), http:// www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate -papers/18/production-in-view-allan-sekulas -fish-story-and-the-thawing-of-postmodernism, accessed June 18, 2018.

5 Thomas McEvilley, “Casa da Cultura,” in Casa da Cultura, exh. cat. (Dublin: Kerlin Gallery, 1998), n.p.

6 The Troubles refers to the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland framed by a civil rights march held in Derry on October 5, 1968, and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. At the heart of the struggle lay the constitutional status of Northern Ireland.

7 McEvilley, “Casa da Cultura,” n.p.

8 McEvilley, “Casa da Cultura,” n.p.

9 Quoted in Ed Vulliamy, “Painted back to life: Brian maguire’s portraits of the victims of Mexico’s ‘feminocidio,’ ” Guardian, May 4, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign /2014/may/04/brian-maguire-portraits-victims -mexico-feminocidio-ciudad-juarez.

10 McEvilley, “Casa da Cultura,” n.p.

11 McEvilley, “Casa da Cultura,” n.p.

12 Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” “Photography,” special issue, Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 864; reprinted in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 58.

13 Christian Viveros-Fauné, “The Part about Our Crimes: Mexico, Violence and the Art of Teresa Margolles and Brian Maguire,” in An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom, exh. cat. (Carlow, Ireland: Visual Centre for Contemporary Art and the George Bernard Shaw Theatre, 2012), 19, 21.

14 Visit http://immigrant-movement.us/wordpress /about/ for more information on Immigrant Movement International.

15 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 16.

16 Glenn Ligon, “On the Ground,” in Julie Mehretu: Grey Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2017), 79.

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Bentiu Camp South Sudan 1, 2018 Acrylic on linen 78 ¾ × 157 ½ inches (200 × 400 cm)

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Bentiu Camp South Sudan 2, 2018 Acrylic on linen 72 ⅞ × 196 ⅞ inches (185 × 500 cm)

For Humanity Site Unseen, an exhibition

of each of a group of fifteen people—one

of artwork by Brian Maguire at the Royal

for the artist and one for the person with

Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in September

whom he worked, to keep (pp. 22–23). The art

2018, Declan McGonagle explained that

process, even in highly stressed situations,

the “Protection of Civilians” camp, with the

can provide individual and collective validation

population of a small city, was built by the

and self-respect and proof of existence—when

international humanitarian organization

existence itself may be under threat—because

Concern Worldwide and the men and

culture, being, in my view, what people make

women of Bentiu in Unity State, South

and do to add value to the quality of their

Sudan. McGonagle continues: “Maguire

lives, is something we inhabit and which

spent a number of weeks in South Sudan,

inhabits us, and not something we consume.

working with people who had been forcibly

Art makes visible and communicates what is

displaced by civil conflict, whose horizons—

invisible, in terms of the nature and meaning

as represented in these two large-scale,

of human experience.”

immersive paintings—were now defined by the camp (pp. 17, 21). The artist worked with groups of children and also made two portraits

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21

David Mayiel, 2018 Chalk on paper 15 ¾ × 11 ⅞ inches (40 × 30 cm) Christy and Valerie Moore, Dublin

Nyaboura Maliah, 2018 Chalk on paper 15 ¾ × 11 ⅞ inches (40 × 30 cm)

Veronica Meer Reath, 2018 Chalk on paper 15 ¾ × 11 ⅞ inches (40 × 30 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

Stephen Guong, 2018 Chalk on paper 15 ¾ × 11 ⅞ inches (40 × 30 cm)

Mary Nyaluak, 2018 Chalk on paper 15 ¾ × 11 ⅞ inches (40 × 30 cm)

Nyayouka Malual, 2018 Chalk on paper 15 ¾ × 11 ⅞ inches (40 × 30 cm)

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Apartments Aleppo, 2016 Acrylic on linen 114 ¼ × 106 ⅜ inches (290 × 270 cm)

A quantum leap separates Brian Maguire’s

Sarajevo and countless other Bosnian cities

first study of bomb and shell damage to

and towns; Nasiriya and Najaf, Iraq . . . even,

buildings in the Syrian city of Aleppo (p. 25)

in a way, the World Trade Center. I could

and the five paintings that follow (pp. 27–39).

smell the charred masonry, the stench of

The difference is that the first is from a

death. In that regard, Maguire here paints the

photograph, the second from point-blank

Aleppo he beheld, and every city flattened by

range in the city itself, leveled into the rubble

madness of war and bombing.

of its own stone. The Battle of Aleppo raged

But this is also specific. The black, vacant

from 2012 to 2016, when the city that had

spaces dominate the paintings like the empty

been taken by rebels from the Free Syrian

eyes of a skull. The devastation is total: in

Army (and other quarters by the al-Qaeda-

Aleppo 3 (p. 31), there is a palpable downward

affiliated al-Nusra Front) finally fell to troops

movement of the pulverized cement as the

loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Most

building nears collapse. The streak of blood-

of the damage—and acute suffering of

red in the 2017 painting becomes a gash,

which the world had an occasional glimpse

a smear, in Aleppo 4 (p. 35). The deserted,

from visiting correspondents and trapped

decimated street in Aleppo 1 (p. 27) is an

“citizen journalists”—had been wrought by

abyss, a thoroughfare to nowhere. In Aleppo 2

the Russian air force rather than the army’s

(p. 29), we are ourselves almost smothered by

heavy guns. All sides have been accused of

the scree of rubble, while the wreckage of the

war crimes, as civilians and hospitals were

building towers but totters behind. These are

regularly targeted.

paintings of war without end—in the words of

When I beheld these paintings in Maguire’s studio, my mind’s eye repaired inevitably to Basra, Iraq; Vukovar, Croatia;

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Edwin Starr, “War, huh, yeah! / What is it good for? / Absolutely nothing.”

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Aleppo 1, 2017 Acrylic on linen 78 ¾ × 63 inches (200 × 160 cm)

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Aleppo 2, 2017 Acrylic on linen 78 ¾ × 63 inches (200 × 160 cm)

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Aleppo 3, 2017 Acrylic on linen 82 ⅝ × 66 ⅞ inches (210 × 170 cm)

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32

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Aleppo 4, 2017 Acrylic on linen 78 ¾ × 157 ½ inches (200 × 400 cm)

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Aleppo 5, 2017 Acrylic on linen 114 ⅛ × 152 ⅜ inches (290 × 387 cm)

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ED VULLIAMY

From His Own Eyes: A Message of War and Struggle I will never judge a fighter, whether they are fighting the police in Northern Ireland or as a criminal in Dublin. The creation of a human being is a rich and mysterious process. I do believe in the right to defend oneself, but I cannot accept that anyone has the right to rub out another human being. Once that is done, it is indefensible.

—Brian Maguire, 2018

Brian Maguire stands—feet apart, almost as though to attention—beside a series of giant canvases arranged across two walls of his ample but appositely shambolic studio space in Paris. They are six, and overwhelming: scenes of what were once streets and buildings, leveled into the dust of their own stone and concrete. This is Aleppo, Syria, after the rebel stronghold had fallen to the army of dictator Bashar al-Assad and his allies, the bombs of the Russian air force. Where once there were windows, there are chasms, black holes like the eyes of piled skulls. Where once was teeming life, now a ghastly stillness pervades these vast works.

As the great writer and war reporter Lara Marlowe wrote of these paintings in the Irish Times: “Canyons of gutted structures, black, gray and beige against the sky. Shrapnel holes that make walls look like gruyère cheese. Apartment buildings collapsed into stacks of pancaked floors. The Irish painter Brian Maguire’s giant canvases of eastern Aleppo are so real one feels one could walk into these streets of devastation.” 1 After working in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo, she should know.

And as a war correspondent myself for many decades, I feel a sense of fear, empathy—and flashback to Basra, Iraq, in 1991; Vukovar, Croatia, the same year; Sarajevo and so many other places across Bosnia in 1992; Nasiriya and Najaf, Iraq again, in 2003. Even the World Trade Center in September 2001. I can smell the charred masonry, the abject ruin, the sickly bittersweet stench of incinerated humanity and death.

But something occurs, once one balances oneself and catches breath. One painting stands apart: not for any reason of quality, but of atmosphere—it portrays the terrible scene of an empty, gutted building, but seems to convey it less directly than the others; the devastation is seen from a distance,

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though not only a spatial one. The answer is this: Apartments Aleppo (p. 25) was painted from a photograph in 2016, when Maguire was following the carnage in Syria from his street in Paris and neighborhood Algerian café. One afternoon, I brought the Syrian poet Maram al-Masri to meet Maguire, and she told him over tea about her son and brother fighting in “the revolution”; Maguire gave her a piece of soap from his nearby store, made in “Alep.” And as we stared at Apartments Aleppo—which stood alone at that time—Maram, clutching the soap, began to cry.

The other canvases, Aleppo 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (pp. 27–39), were painted a year later—having been to the streets themselves. Says Maguire, “There’s a harshness to these paintings from there that’s just not here in the one from the photograph. . . . After seeing Aleppo, the scale gets bigger and bigger. There’s more use of black to fill the blown-out masonry. . . .” Indeed, there’s more of everything. Here’s the difference, not just between the canvases but between Maguire and almost every other artist painting today: just as I know this desolation—so does he.

To call Maguire a “war artist” is to simplify, but there is this: to say what he wants to say, Maguire has to be there, to bear witness, in the manner of Paul Nash or—dare one say it—his inspiration, Goya. Only Maguire’s wars include those from which one cannot return home, because they are at home, and not just the Troubles in his native Ireland: war in the mind, war with alcohol addiction, war against women, the battlefield of capitalism, war in prisons and in society at large. “There’s one thing I share with photo-journalists,” Maguire told Lara Marlowe.

“I actually go there. It doesn’t work unless you do that. There’s something about sharing a space with the people who are there that enables you to have some ownership of the images.” 2 This point brings us to something else that marks Maguire out, profoundly so: he subscribes to a belief not unlike the Native Americans who thought that to take a photograph of them was to steal something of their soul. Maguire posits that to paint someone is “to steal from them in some way, even to the point of abuse, perhaps. And that is something that requires the artist to pay back a debt to the subject.” So that

Syria, March 2017

when the Aleppo paintings went on show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin in February 2018, Maguire showed me photographs of art classes he gave to children in the devastated city, arranged along wooden benches, the artist in his coat and gray trilby: “The coat is a bad sign; you never knew when you might have to do a runner!” He was planning visits to refugee camps in Lebanon, to which some of the citizens bombed out of those buildings had fled, in order to paint—but also to teach—further. “There’s a lot of refugee Syrian people in Lebanon and, more particularly for Aleppo, in Jordan,” he susses, “and it’s getting dodgy. Trafficking of women and children to the very Gulf states that are arming the militant Islamists.”

It was the same when Maguire went to Ciudad Juárez, when it was the most murderous city in the world (2008–12), to paint portraits of young victims of the atrocious feminocidio (pp. 87–91), the mass murder of women (by necessity, from photos this time); he made one of each girl for exhibition, and a second, usually brighter, as a donation to the mother—and taught the dead women’s children. Juárez is what bought Maguire and me together, but that’s another story, for later.

Maguire is not of Traveller stock, but he is an Irish traveler.

He paints in Paris, in spacious but appositely cluttered

quarters on the first floor off a courtyard in the 19th arrondissement, with cobblestone and woodwork beams that make it feel more Norman provincial than of the capital.

Beneath, there’s a wonderful late nineteenth-century litho press, fully functional. His family home is in South Dublin, at the far end of Maguire’s regular run on the Cherbourg– Rosslare ferry, tucked against the foothills of the Wicklow mountains. His sons live in Utrecht, London, and Singapore, and just before the Aleppo paintings were hung at IMMA, he had paid visits to all, plus research in South Sudan.

But it is in the one place Maguire calls “definitely forever home,” those Wicklow foothills, that we take the family dog, Rocky, for a long walk one morning, to look down on Dublin Bay and start our reflections.

Maguire grew up in a terrace of rented red-brick houses at Bray, south of Dublin. The “artistic gene,” he says, came from his maternal grandmother, a dressmaker married to the city manager of Wexford; the O’Sullivans, says Maguire, “were the English branch of the family who wore tuxedos to dinner— well-to-do, schooled privately; we had little to do with that.”

But from Grandmother Anastasia Fergusson, Maguire’s mother, orphaned young, Kathleen O’Sullivan, is the subject of some of his most poignant paintings (p. 113), “severely depressed at times in her long life. When she was ill, I’d be

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function.” From there, Maguire proceeded to the National College of Art in Dublin. But by then he had “started drinking, aged fifteen,” a relationship with alcohol that would become catastrophic, but from which the exit would form the basis of his professional career, of which more later.

Meanwhile, Ireland—like the rest of the world—was in a state of embryonic tumult: revolt in 1968 against communism in Prague, against capitalism in Paris, militarism in Mexico and Chicago, against everything in San Francisco and Ireland, for civil rights and against British rule in the North. Maguire found himself

Artist and friend Pádraig Ó Faoláin allowed Maguire (above) use of the 3rd floor of 59 Mountjoy Square, Dublin, as his studio in 1984–91.

given away to another lady to be looked after.” His father, Paddy Maguire, “came from Northern Ireland, a trade unionist who wanted to be a teacher, but the border and its rules put an end to his ambition, so he learned his trade in a hardware store. He backed horses, and sang.” Maguire points to Rocky, chasing a stick thrown into the heather: “We had a dog like her, and mountains like this behind Bray—I had friends who are still in my life, but was mostly alone with the dog and the landscape.” At school, he won a painting competition but “made the teachers miserable with my behavior, for which I was regularly beaten. I met authority in the education system in the form of the Christian Brothers, but also my teacher who would cycle twenty miles into Dublin to get paper free from the newspaper printer for the kids to paint with.” Likewise, at secondary school: “For some reason I took up painting, although they didn’t teach it—maybe because they didn’t.

It was a way of hiding, just staying quiet.”

The boy painted well enough to be admitted as an art student at the technical college in Dún Laoghaire, where a teacher called Owen Butler “taught me technique based on the Bauhaus Curriculum from the Weimar University—how to draw from observation; how color, background, depth, etc.,

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at a distance from aspects of the ’60s thing, more interested in class politics. There was a hippie and anarchist thing in Dublin, but not in Bray, and I had connected with a harder, more working-class milieu.

Something in my upbringing gave me a sense of justice and injustice: not a moral thing of good and bad—but more a question of power. Something I learned when a tribunal of professors and department officials wanted us to give them names of students involved in planning the occupations, which I refused to give, naming the professors on the tribunal as the guilty ones.

It seemed to me that the state was always controlled by the biggest interests at the cost of the weak and weaker interests. I researched the big companies, to find that most factories were owned by people with double-barreled names, many of whom survived the Titanic. We students started reading about the Black Panthers, Communist books, Dispatches by Michael Herr—understanding the Vietnam War with a different kind of journalism. Books that brought the reality of other places into my home. And I joined Sinn Féin, just after they split with the Provos. Sinn Féin meant more to me than the new student groups—it had had a physical presence since the founding of the Irish state, the IRA belonged to Irish history, and I was someone who did not belong to anything wanting to belong.

There was a collective buzz to politics: people from the

Official Sinn Féin—the Workers Party—standing for election, and failing mostly.

Maguire is forgivably coy when discussing his involvement with what came to be called the Official Irish Republican movement and Workers Party, political wing of the “Stickies,” the Official IRA. They were so called after summer 1969, when Protestant mobs stormed and burned Catholic homes along Falls Road in Belfast, but the IRA—then under Marxist command—refused to engage them with guns, insisting that it was anti-sectarian. Many nationalist republicans were outraged, and the slogan appeared: IRA = I Ran Away; the movement split, and those in favor of an armed response formed the Provisionals, or Provo IRA. Eventually, the remaining Communists conjoined the “armed struggle” against the British army, bombing a barracks in Aldershot, England, but declared a cease-fire in 1972 in pursuit of a united socialist Ireland. The Provos, famously and infamously, fought on. Lore has it that during Easter commemorations, the Provos wore metal lapel-pin lilies, while the Officials wore sticky-backed ones.

There is no reason whatsoever to think Maguire ever took a life, or directly contributed to the taking of a life, during those three years of fighting by the Official IRA, but he does like to joke: for instance, when discussing Pink Floyd at his apartment one evening, on the way out to watch Bosnia play Ireland at football. “Oh, I missed out on all that music stuff— too busy playing cowboys.” A friend of his who came that night, and had been in the Provisionals, supported Bosnia— Brian supported Ireland, which won.

When the Official IRA in turn split, with a rebel group opposing the cease-fire and forming the Irish National Liberation Army, Maguire stayed put: “I had known enough politics not to be part of the Provos, and by the time the second split came, I knew enough about violence not to be part of that.”

Maguire’s painting Roadside Assassination (1983 / 84; p. 219) evokes one of the more curious aspects of his own thinking in his work. It depicts a haunting and haunted scene just

after the murder of a British soldier by the Official IRA—and we see the face of the killer, possessed in some way by what he has done, frantic, aglow. “The soldier was taken to his death in terror, and the volunteer left the scene in terror too,” says Maguire. “It was like the bullet also went back into the man who pulled the trigger. . . . It’s a picture of the horror of the man killed and the killer.” This is new. It is customary for a cause to portray atrocities by its opponents: the peace movement would display on a bridge the famous photograph of a burning North Vietnamese girl; propaganda for the Irish republican side would more normally show Bloody Sunday in Derry than death and damage caused by an IRA bomb.

In our times, people like the Zetas drug cartel in Mexico or Daesh (ISIS) invert that logic, satanically: they show their own atrocities—beheadings, executions—by way of advertising their cause, as though to say, “This is fun, you can do it too.”

Maguire pitches himself in a mode of self-examination and what the Italians call autocritica that lies between the two, outraged but from among his own. This is unthinkably rare in hypocritical politics and even political art: he questions the atrocities of his own side, his own people.

Some of these views were formed during the 1980s, looking back on the 1970s. “After I cleaned up my act, I began to paint my past, starting with the personal stuff, and moving on to the Troubles, the war, the society.” This was before Maguire married his wife, Jenny, who is a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and an absolute pacifist by doctrine and conviction.

As a true Irishman, Maguire likes to quip when asked to grapple with a tricky point. I ask, “Is this confessional, all this dealing with the atrocities of your own people?” “It’s all a confessional,” replies Maguire. “On the other hand, someone asked me, ‘Are you painting your life story?’—No, that’s for when I’m dead.” And there was one very funny moment when the three of us were walking through Montparnasse Cemetery to say hello to Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, and Susan Sontag, whose coffin I had carried, and Maguire said, “Jenny’s persuaded me to be buried in the Quaker cemetery in Dublin.

But I want a full volley!” It was, and it wasn’t, a joke.

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Both Maguire’s paintings of the Troubles and his more personal work are retrospective, however—looking back from the early 1980s, having “become sober.” Brian’s years on the bottle were many, long and self-destructive—subject of some of his more troubling confessional paintings: I began drinking seriously between the time I left college and the time I went for treatment—three to four years. Drink took me out of everything: I was unemployed and unemployable, homeless, uninvolved politically, falling between the cracks in society that a lot of people are falling through. Every day would be a hung-over write-off. Belfast was a bad place for drink; all I saw of Belfast was the inside of bars, though one time I wandered into an area where the chances of a Catholic getting out alive were pretty thin, and I was guided away. “Scrumpy” was always a favorite: the remains of the barrels. I remember a man praising it for its ability to cause brain damage. Everyone thought I was an idiot, and they were right—drinking is all about you; it’s a pointless, selfish world. It was a helter-skelter of alcohol and alcoholics, through which I went to college in 1969, had a child in 1974. Then, just before Christmas in 1979, I realized: this has to stop or else you’ll die drunk, literally. I went into a program, and I’ve been off it ever since—and that’s when my career began. A little bit of teaching sustained me financially, and I started working seriously as an artist around 1979–80; I used painting to look back at my life—at my personal history, at violence, at political events I’d seen: first the Troubles, then gangland shootings. I think all work is reflective in that way—whether you are looking outward or inward. A studio is not part of the world, but it’s a place to bring your memories and observations of the world.

Back from one of our walks, Maguire describes the guiding principle he adopted at this time, with regard to both his retrospective work and that to come—a principle at the

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kernel of his work ever since: “I decided that I couldn’t make a painting without something of the real world being in, or part of, some aspect of the subject. You have to be part of the story. This is the method of the projects I do—and if you work that way, it can take ten years to complete a project. It takes a long time to belong somewhere enough to paint it.” Also around this time: “There was an exhibition in Paris, with three Goya pieces in it, from the Spanish campaigns. They were both ordinary and extraordinary; I went to Madrid and saw the rest.”

Maguire and I sit one morning over coffee in central Dublin with the art curator and teacher Declan McGonagle, former director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and of the National College of Art and Design when Maguire taught there in the 1990s. McGonagle posits that “the principle that Brian sits in the middle of is a validation of all art: it’s the ethical responsibility of an aesthetic response.” The ethical vision is a functioning part of the poetic imagination, not an optional addition. There’s an objection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which, says Maguire, “lauds the artist’s right to desocialize, to disconnect the aesthetic responsibility from the ethical element—‘I’m doing this because I like doing it’—that’s not what art is about.” We could argue forever about whether nonethical art can exist (which I think it can), but focus instead on the actual aesthetic. “I try to make things as aesthetic as I can, but that is not the main point. The aesthetics are a means to an end”—which is ethical, or even didactic. “I don’t have a problem with abstract art, but I do have a problem with abstraction itself.”

Although both men eschew “convention,” and to McGonagle “a museum is an anxious world,” he is a firm believer in formal aesthetic and technical grounding (as my youngest daughter puts it, with regard to her art foundation course, “Technique and respect for traditional teaching is the new radical at art school”). “Painting has a syntax,” insists McGonagle—he could say the same about music—and “when you are learning a language, you have to know the syntax of that language, otherwise you won’t be able to communicate what you want to say to anybody.” To which Maguire adds,

want and only what I want, and sometimes one is isolated.”

As we shall see in the paintings, a series done previous to the time of the IRA’s attack on Canary Wharf, later shown after the Good Friday peace treaty had been agreed, rustled feathers the wrong way entirely. Even then, however, says McGonagle, “Brian had a place to hide in Dublin. In Derry [where he played a role in the remarkably successful City of Culture in 2013], there was no place for art to hide during the Troubles.” Maguire points out that the Nazis burned the books, condemned the paintings, and then killed their enemies.

They attacked language and culture in preparation for their politics of murder.

In the mid-1980s, Maguire began teaching in Portlaoise Prison, west of Dublin. The project was by the National College of Art and Design, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, Prisons (later termed Irish Prison Services, or IPS),

The gym below E1, which doubled as an art room for nonpolitical prisoners in maximum security, Portlaoise Prison

“You have to know that if you shade that particular color, it’ll look heavier; if you put gray on that background, it’ll look different from putting gray on another background; if you put yellow in front of red, it’ll come out at you—these things are just true to the eye, and necessary. Good art has to be good.

Bad art is nothing.”

And there’s the milieu in which the artist must work, to be effective: “If you want to be an artist, you have to work in the art world, to function within the system. But I do what I

and I loved it. I’d never met people from a similar background to me who understood that there was this border toward the North of our country that was trouble in itself. The Provos were strong at that time, and a lot of them were in prison, as were the organized criminals—the older generation of Dublin criminals, my age and a little older. Now I could work differently: not from looking back or reading the newspapers, but on and with the people around me. They may indeed learn something from me, but I definitely could learn from them.

My method of teaching in this environment, a working-class environment, is to show rather than to talk. And there was nothing of interest to paint in a prison apart from the human beings incarcerated there; I was interested in the humanity of the prisoners and the inhumanity of the prison. So I’d paint them, then they’d paint each other.

Maguire’s work from this period is collected by the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

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Barbara Dawson, director of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, with Maguire in his studio in Sandyford, Dublin, 1998

Among his prisoner-pupils was the bank robber Eddie Cahill, whose description of Maguire at work—accompanying a portrait of Cahill (p. 123)—speaks more informatively about his methods and approach, perhaps, than any of Maguire’s own words: “I thought, okay, I’ll have a look at this. And Maguire comes in. And I say: ‘But where’s the art teacher?’ He looked like another prisoner. . . . I waited for a few lessons, watching him working, making magic little marks. I was amazed—and he seemed sound, like a cuckoo in someone else’s nest—plus the screws didn’t like him, and that was good enough for me.”

The portraits gave rise to Maguire’s exhibition Prejudicial Portraits, first shown in the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, in 1992 and later in IMMA, in 1993, with a catalogue essay by James Harithas. Maguire’s observation on the humanity of prisoners and inhumanity of jail is a metaphor, a maquette, for his view of society as a whole. Maguire has a strange relationship with Ireland. At one level, he adores it, and the Irish. He has the name of his country in his e-mail address, and enjoys a comfort with its people and culture that I envy viscerally from the abomination of Brexit Britain, where one is not so much dissident but living in a state of bitter existential alienation. Maguire, however, is dissident to the

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core. When I was writing for the Observer on the centennial of the 1916 Easter Rising—which fell shortly after the discovery of a mass grave of children at an orphanage run by nuns at Tuam—Maguire spoke of “the crucial line in the Proclamation as far as I’m concerned, about cherishing children equally, and it certainly isn’t happening. All that—Tuam, the church abuse of children—was the legacy of how de Valera hijacked the Rising, and forged the world in which I grew up: Catholic, in the dark.” In the paintings that follow, Maguire addresses themes that stir his wrath and his palette: teenage suicide, alienation, and crime—and financial corruption of the kind that led to the crash of 2008, “the ruin of Irish society by Irish banks.” His work in prisons has stayed with him, literally: his house in South Dublin plays host to asylum seekers and released prisoners.

“Just as the Provos fought the police with guns, so some bank robbers fought southern society with crime,” says Maguire. I challenge him: “Killing Veronica Guerin [a journalist murdered for her investigations of the Dublin underworld] wasn’t fighting the police.” “Of course it wasn’t,” concedes Maguire, but I pursue this: how can one be pacifist and apparently justify violent criminals? “Look,” he replies, “when I meet these people, they are unarmed. By the time I work with some prisoners, they are already looking for a way out. I’m trying to communicate that painting is a means of resistance, albeit a legal one. In regards to the killing of Veronica, I had worked previously with one person convicted (later overturned) in that killing while others were hostile or ignored the classes.” On another occasion, he said, “Have you noticed that Beckett never judged anyone?” He recalls that the journalist Patrick Cockburn’s father, Claud, wrote in the early 1970s in the Irish Times a description of Al Capone as a businessman (if illegal) whose reason (making money) and methods (exploitation of other people) were on a par with modern business practice. Maguire noted this so many years before he entered the jails and there met both types of criminal—the Capone type and the other whose crime was a reaction and resistance. And had little to do with getting wealthy.

Maguire “continued working for the prison scheme, and made a point of putting on public exhibitions of the work in the Republic, from which I became known to the prison arts foundation in Northern Ireland.” At that time, negotiations were closing in on the Good Friday peace treaty of 1999, and “the UK government were preparing to close Long Kesh prison,” the internment camp for suspected members of the various armed groups themselves readying to disband.

“They asked whether I’d do a project there, before it closes.

It was more than I could hope for—right to the heart of it all, meeting Loyalists and Loyalist groups for the first time.

Yes, there was one dodgy night, late for a meeting and hanging around there in a Dublin-registered car. I met the people, not the leadership. I met the men who were being sent to kill, not the men sending them.”

The result was one of Maguire’s most audacious public works: a billboard posted on Newtownards Road, a Loyalist stronghold, intended to be an artistic “coming home” parade for the released prisoners—killers—from the UDA and UVF paramilitary armies (pp. 142–43). The public place was Maguire’s response to the authorities vetoing a public exhibition of his work in Long Kesh, which they wanted to remain private. The logic, although it relates to an effective icon of killers on the side of Ulster’s union to Britain— anathema to Maguire—cuts to the core of his thinking about violence, soldiers, and the establishment.

I grew up watching television pictures of parades after the Korean War, children waving banners when their soldiers came home from the war. And I thought: maybe I can contribute something like that in Belfast, when these men come home to their communities.

I discussed this with the British government. They were horrified. Their view was that they didn’t mind me painting the prisoners, but not in public; they didn’t want any kind of display. They wanted them to disappear, even though some of them had been elected to the new assembly. Senior civil servants briefed against David Ervine, whispering he was a

murderer—this man who, as much as anyone, worked after his release from prison to bring peace to Ireland.

And I thought: hang on. The British government can kill hundreds of people in Ireland, and not one of its soldiers was a murderer—that army would come home to a hero’s welcome in the press and wherever they lived. They were heroes, but the Loyalists who killed on their behalf were murderers? And the republicans who fought on the other side were terrorists? I thought this self-delusion of the British government breathtaking.

“They’re killers!” I was told, and in my mind I replied: “You show me one government in the world that does not have its killers.”

One of the men was in the UVF. The car came from Woodvale, along the Shankill. I got into the back and we did the meeting driving around Belfast—they thought it too dangerous for me to go to their office, partly because of who I am and partly because that day the Shankill was ready to burn.

As time went by in the 2000s, the relationships between republicans and Loyalists I witnessed showed that there had come about a kind of understanding, yes, between them and the IRA—they were both soldiers.

Catholics who came to the exhibition “were astounded that I’d been working with Michael Stone,” says Maguire of one of his subjects. Stone was one of a notorious unit of sectarian killers called the Graveyard Gang, run by a British MI5 agent. His most infamous attack was on the funeral in Milltown cemetery of three IRA volunteers killed in Gibraltar in 1988. “People just didn’t get why I’d be associated with a man like that, and paint his portrait.” Even here, Maguire began to deploy the theme of reciprocity that hallmarks his attitude to portraiture: “There were two: one portrait was given to him, the other I kept.” He added, “Why did I do this? Well, it was simply that Michael Stone was serving time in the prison camp. I do not judge anyone or choose to work with this one and not with the other.

I worked with whoever was in front of me, regardless of their offense. I worked over the years with every type of prisoner.”

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Back on the mountain with Rocky, I ask Maguire, “To what extent do you see this place as a painting?” “Almost zero,” he replies. Why? “When you are involved in something that is pleasurable, I am in it, not observing it. Then I’ll get home, sit in front of the fire. Then things come back to me, or things jump out at me from the newspapers—and those are the things I’ll work on, or decide to work on.”

And the next place Maguire went, to “bring back” to his studio, was in the footsteps of the work in Portlaoise and Long Kesh—only it was in Brazil.

I went to Brazil because of Fiach Mac Conghail [director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin]. Fiach was curator / commissioner of the Irish pavilion at the Bienal in São Paulo, and he wanted an artist with an understanding of class politics—since this really was the place of the class war. Fiach and I went there at first to see how the people of Brazil lived, through a kind of Dublin lens. Then I finally got into the famous Carandiru prison, through members of a family who worked there—Raul and Osmar Araujo. I had been trying for four months to enter the prison, but the Araujos had an NGO which provided serious legal and health support for prisoners, and we got in within two days. It was unforgettable: at the entrance, there stood a thin, elderly man with a revolver and a sawn-off shotgun, and a younger fat man also armed with an automatic rifle. We met with the governor, who very pleasantly explained the rules: you can go anywhere, but if someone decides to take you hostage, we will go in and shoot everybody, including you.

Carandiru is one of the world’s famous—and infamous— jails, and the scene in 1992 of a massacre of prisoners by special police. Coverage in the New York Times in the immediate aftermath relates how police initially tried to put the death toll at 8, but were then forced to increase that to 111 (“an American priest told us it was more likely to have been 400,” says Maguire). Although the authorities

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initially tried to blame the deaths on other prisoners, in 2013 twenty-three police officers were sentenced to a total of 163 years for their parts in the massacre. This verdict was subsequently overturned on appeal. The prison is the setting for a remarkable book, translated into English as Lockdown, by Drauzio Varella, a doctor specializing in HIV and treating positive inmates. I met the unforgettably impressive Varella in Warsaw in 2014, soon after meeting Maguire, to whom I of course forwarded a copy of the book.

“When I read Varella’s book,” he said later, “I felt I had walked in its footsteps.” Maguire relates how he spoke with survivors of the massacre and also with prison guards who were eyewitnesses: “We assembled a class of students from the general population, which included the tattooist, who had the most commercially viable operation in the prison. I made drawings of each of the men. I don’t have them now, as they stayed with the sitters. The men showed me the drawings and paintings they had made as a memorial to the massacred. I did an illustrated lecture in a large hall in the prison, and there were some anxious moments that I was blissfully unaware of, because of my use of profanities in my talk.”

Maguire’s work in Brazil was not confined to the prison.

Indeed, it accounts for only one painting in this collection: the aftermath of the massacre, bodies in boxes against vortices of gray masonry and vast but stifling space (p. 159). Maguire also worked in the favela shantytowns, some of the poorest in the world—drawing children, teaching children to draw—in one case, at the back of a slum (pp. 150–55). The children were attending a day-care-type facility founded by an Irish priest, Pat Clarke, where childhood activities using theater, drawing, language, and play formed the curriculum, together with breakfast and lunch.

The teachers included an art school graduate, a theater person, and a psychologist. In simple terms, these children’s childhood was rescued for them by their participation. (In the years before I arrived, young children were armed by mafia and sent to steal from cars parked at the red lights.) I drew the kids twice.

The first piece was brought by the children and hung in their home. I photographed the work hanging in the home, and this became part of the exhibition. It was my way to bring the favela to the Bienal. The second work is in the collection of IMMA. Back from Brazil, Maguire “dabbled,” as he puts it, in fulltime teaching at the National College of Art and Design, first under Noel Sheridan, then Colm O’Briain, and finally under McGonagle. While there, he pioneered the use of placement in students’ education, allowing them to spend semesters in Central Europe, local self-help NGOs in Central Dublin, and also with research trips to South America and North and Central Africa.

But he was uneasy off the road and left after nine years, “and went to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. I went back to making art, to things I care about.” This was 2010, and how Maguire and I met.

I had been for many years fascinated by, and working across, the borderland along and astride the U.S.-Mexican frontier, terrain I call Amexica—the title of a book I published in 2010, on what was by then a raging drug and turf war between cartels, the police, and the army.

The drug war had had a macabre and brutal prologue, centered on Ciudad Juárez, the old Paso del Norte, opposite El Paso, Texas, over the Rio Grande: the so-called feminocidio—mass abduction, violation, mutilation, torture, and murder of women, mainly young women. I had written extensively on the feminocidio since its origins in the 1990s, and on how—as the Mexican American anthropologist and writer Cecilia Ballí puts it—the “style of killing” and hyperviolence used against the women was a prototype for that which hallmarks the drug war, “and I don’t use the word ‘style’ lightly,” 3 counsels Ballí.

Three years after my book was published, the Irish filmmaker Mark McLoughlin broadcast a feature documentary, Blood Rising (2013; p. 93), about Maguire’s work in Juárez, to which he had been, perhaps inevitably, drawn. We met at its London premiere—I was overwhelmed.

In one scene: Bertha Alicia contemplates the portrait of her murdered daughter, Brenda Berenice (p. 91), at first with

little expression on her face. Then she nods approvingly, turns to the wall of her little home in Juárez, and takes down a picture of a chicken from Looney Tunes that is hanging there, and puts the portrait in its place. It is as though the dead Brenda had, in some form, returned home. This is Maguire’s “exchange” in action. In the scene, he stands ill at ease as Bertha thanks him for the portrait and hugs him; the embrace is utterly sincere, almost desperate, from both sides.

In an earlier scene, mother and painter had sat together on a sofa talking about Brenda’s life and death, and they joined hands. Then they continued to sit, intimately but awkwardly, not knowing what to do, not wanting to let go.

There have been several attempts—on screen and on the page—to convey the horror and the disbelief of the feminocidio— markedly Roberto Bolaño’s epic masterpiece 2666 (2004)—and the humbling defiance of the dead girls’ mothers. Maguire’s painting and McLoughlin’s film rank high among them, in showing and handling not only the barbarism of its subject matter but its delicacy, and the sensitivities inherent in covering it at all. As Maguire learned while painting portraits of prisoners in the jails of Ireland, the sitters stay; he goes home. Narrators of stories of this kind, if they care, have a fear of exploiting grief as they walk the high wire between narrative and voyeurism.

For the first time in a report on the feminocidio by foreigners, manipulation is entirely absent from the telling.

The girls were invariably captured while running errands in the center of town, or on their way to or from work in the hundreds of maquiladoras: sweatshop assembly plants that constitute the economy of Juárez, manufacturing (for rock-bottom wages) the goods that America and Europe deem essential to keep their supermarket shelves and carconcession outlets stocked. The reactions to the killings of their employees, by the multinational corporations that own the factories, have ranged from callous indifference to offensive disregard. As regards Mexican officials (not all, as Maguire stresses), one sixteen-year-old, sexually assaulted and murdered, was last seen in a police station.

After the murder of Erika Perez Escobedo, a modest monument was built with plastic flowers; it was later

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bulldozed into the dust. In McLoughlin’s film, Erika’s mother, Elia, finds the plastic flowers in the rubble. The murdered girls are blamed for going out alone and their parents for allowing them. “The message,” says Maguire, “is that here you can kill working-class women with impunity.”

There were connections between the feminocidio and the drug war. First, in what Cecilia Ballí calls the “style of killing,” whereby the perverse ferocity of the narco war (its mutilations and decapitations) seems to have been “predicted” by that of the feminocidio. Second, and more directly, some of the murders of women seem to have been committed by members of an embryonic branch of the Juárez narco-trafficking cartel called La Linea, “the Line.” One of the girls, Erika Perez Escobedo, was found in the street, strangled, her underwear disturbed; another, Guadalupe Verónica Castro (p. 87), was raped and drugged for twenty-one days, and her left breast was cut off before she was buried alive.

“The killings of these women in Juárez were not titfor-tat killings,” says McLoughlin. “They are killings at a level of psychic perversion that is hard to understand.

And that was the challenge. We had to take this on board emotionally. We built relationships with the mothers and families, and all the time this anger and fear was building up, frustration and bewilderment. And you take on the fear and grief of the people themselves, until sometimes you’d hit an emotional brick wall, out of exhaustion. Brian would call me up and say, ‘I’ve been crying, have you?’ And I’d answer, ‘Yes, I have.’”

Maguire was in Juárez not for the customary weeks and months that many reporters invest, but for different periods over ten years. “When I heard about what was happening in Juárez,” says Maguire, “it figured, of course—women come below men, poor come below rich, brown comes below white, and Mexico comes below America, young below old. They don’t fucking count, and that is why they die.” He says he learned that “these people wanted their story told, more so in the event of there being no justice for them. The thing they ask is that the memory of their daughters, and the actions done to them, not disappear with their deaths.”

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Some family members of feminocidio victims posing after an art class in Ciudad Juárez, 2011

In the case of Brenda Berenice Castillo García, Maguire says, “I was in a state of cold fury. Here was a sixteen-yearold, the age at which young women in Juárez begin to make families. But unlike the Netherlands or France, employment law is not applied [in Brenda’s case]; she is denied maternity leave and laid off by her employer, because she’s pregnant.

Thirty days after Kevin’s birth, there’s no money for milk to give her baby, so she goes in search of work at a jewelry store in downtown Juárez—and disappears.”

Crucially to his modus operandi, Maguire made his Juárez portraits in pairs: one to exhibit, the other for the families to keep. Markedly, the one for the families is usually colored; the girl is very much alive. In some cases, those for “keeps” and exhibition are more monochrome, and a few give off the aura of death. They are more intimate and closely focused than his previous work, lighter of touch, but no less impactful. The portrait of Brenda for exhibition, in monochrome, shows her

features distorted only slightly but in such a way that vividly and disconcertingly seems to convey her doom. Another, in color, exudes the life of the young woman. Brenda’s mother, recounts Maguire, “saw the black-and-white picture, but she wanted something that recalled her living child. She had another photograph, from school days—and from that I painted the second in color, which she put on the wall.

However, I did notice a copy of the first on her dresser— I felt strangely gratified that she wanted that portrait too, but privately.”

“Most work,” Maguire says in the film, “as Declan McGonagle says, is a negotiation, most work is an exchange . . . [one in which] you have to give something back.” 4 During a Q&A with the audience after the London screening of Blood Rising, he added that the murdered girls’ families “were in our hands, and we were in their hands too.

They had to trust that we would not exploit them.” 5 In conversation with me, Maguire expands on this: “You have to bring some item of value to the place and people, which gives you the right to work there. And that value needs to be negotiated. At a meeting in Ciudad Chihuahua in the women’s shelter, the human rights lawyer Lucia Castro stressed to me that the Mexican government did not care what she or her colleagues said, but that if you tell this story in the U.S. and in Europe, then she will be heard by the government.” The artist not only paints the portraits, he also teaches the children of the murdered girls. One of the film’s most heartrending scenes shows one of these art classes and the joy these children experience when painting. This was the contract with the NGO May Our Daughters Come Home: that the group introduced Brian to the families in Juárez, and he ran art classes for the orphans.

As I was watching Blood Rising and talking to Maguire, a thought occurred to me, forcefully: Mexico is a country in which the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is more important to most people than God himself. Popular faith in Mexico tends to be “folk Catholicism,” syncretic with Aztec and Mayan beliefs, and deities that preceded the Hispanic Christianity that incorporated rather than replaced them.

Popular faith in Mexico is sensitive to the occult, whereby the image, the icon, is everything. There is something about the Juárez narrative that expresses Maguire’s politics more clearly even than the Ireland he knows better. These atrocious stories are not from some exotically distant horror show we can switch off; they are integral to our own routines—the blood stains our everyday lives. “This is not another world,” Maguire told his audience after the London premiere, “it is directly connected to our world—in fact, it is our world. It’s right under the bonnet of your car: your electric cables are made in Juárez.” 6 When we sit down to talk, he says, “Juárez is not happenstance, it’s part of an economic construct, our economic construct. These girls make those things like the electrical harnesses for cars; they make all our junk— everything—we use all the time. Juárez is a city that does not care about its people, [who are] human fodder for the factories. They’re now building a new factory to make iPads and things, twenty-five miles out in the desert from Juárez.

That’s fifty miles a day by bus for the workers to and from a place with no shops, nothing but the factory, to be paid less now than they were ten years ago. It’s our system. It’s the telephone I talk on.” There are only two secondary schools for a colonia with a quarter of a million residents.

On his last night at work on the portraits, Maguire recalls, “I was having dinner alone in the safety of El Paso. After four years, it was over. There were two emotions: one, happy, that I’d had the experience, and that we’d made the film.

But also: it’s worthless, it’s meaningless, it’s nothing. We are totally ineffective.

“The mothers have been glad to see us, and we will tell their story. But there is this sense of total helplessness. All I know for certain is that more young factory girls will die in Ciudad Juárez, and that those iPads will be all shiny and new. Julian Cardona [a photographer friend] rescued me.

‘Look, Brian,’ he said, ‘let’s just do our work as best we can, shall we?’”

Maguire had been concerned only with the feminocidio; men were and are killed in Juárez in numbers far greater than

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even the women (ten times the number), and he wanted to convey that too—the hyper-violence itself, that has—at the time of this writing, February 2018—now claimed 139,000 lives in Mexico since 2006, with 40,000 missing. Maguire wanted to see the carnage through the eyes of reporters who risked their lives every day to write a fraction of what they know. “I embedded myself in the newsroom of El Norte.

There’s an irony to that: embedding was something that we heard of in Iraq, the media embedding with troops. This was the reverse, embedding with the journalists.”

El Norte closed down on 2017 after the murder of its investigative reporter in Chihuahua City, Miroslava Breach, but its friendly rival, El Diario, continues each day to report what it can, despite the murder of its leading crime reporter: Armando Rodríguez was shot dead in 2008. That same year, El Norte also lost reporter Carlos Huerta Muñoz, murdered by the cartels.

But it is the violence these journalists and those who survive them tried to write about that intrigues Maguire, violence taken to a level of sadistic, perverse ferocity in Mexico rivaled only by Daesh (ISIS). The mutilations and violence to the human remains were painted by Maguire (pp. 71–77) from photographs in El Norte’s archive (and in one case gleaned by me—a veritable butchery of human parts). And that is not all: what shocked Maguire, as it shocks everyone else, is the public display of this barbarism: bodies mutilated, decapitated, and left—hanging from bridges or dragged to symbolic squares—as messages of intimidation and terror. “When someone is murdered, the deed is over,” reflects Maguire. “But in Mexico, there is a further chapter. The dead are decapitated, de-limbed, bagged, brought to a public place, and posed. This is the extra chapter—it’s a comment: sculpture with human bodies. In Juárez, the posing of people in a particular place is a statement, a choice of space, where people were shot or displayed.”

It is not only manufacturing that connects this violence to our daily lives—it is the money. You cannot go around spending $372 million out of the back of a truck in Mexico— there are not enough mariachi bands, beauty queens, or exotic

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animals to buy for that kind of money. No, you have to bank it, and to do that you have to find a bank that’ll take the money.

This is what I call the Lie of Legality, and this is something Maguire paints that no one else dares—or has the inclination or clairvoyance—to paint.

I’ve worked years on this and, in Amexica and afterward, revealed the receipt of that $372 million by the now defunct Wachovia bank, in profits accrued by the Sinaloa Cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the world’s richest and biggest criminal. Wachovia was caught, admitted failing to properly monitor that amount (an inestimable proportion of which was direct drug money)—but no one went to jail. The bank was fined 0.002 percent of its annual turnover and given a “deferred prosecution”—a yellow card, rap on the wrist— of a year. Be good for that period, and we’ll forget it.

As my source in the bank, Martin Woods, joked, “The cartels should complain to the banks that they’re being ripped off—paying for a risk element that is not there!” And that same bitter humor is there in Maguire’s simple but scathing depiction of packs of cocaine wrapped with the bank’s logo (pp. 64–67). But as Woods also said, more seriously, “If you don’t get the direct connection between the bodies hanging from bridges and the High Street banks, you don’t understand the story.” And that quiet but seething rage is there in Maguire’s paintings too.

It then emerged that the biggest bank in Europe, British HSBC, continued using the same exchange house, Casa de Cambio Puebla, as Wachovia had for two years after it was under investigation by the U.S. authorities. And not only that: a later investigation by the U.S. Treasury found that cartel operatives would arrive at the bank’s own branches and “deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows.” 7 Yet in the land that imprisons more people per capita than any other in the Western world, hundreds of thousands of them for minor drug offenses, no one was arrested, tried, or sent to jail. The punishment of HSBC’s CEO during all this, Stephen Green, was to be appointed to the British cabinet

as minister for trade, and the head of HSBC Mexico, under whose nose it all happened, Paul Thurston, was promoted to head of global retail. There are no words for such outrage; Maguire’s canvas says it all.

Throughout the year 2015, the numbers of refugees from the war in Syria, and migrants from Africa and Asia, converging on Europe swelled. Those fleeing war, climate change, and poverty risked the Mediterranean crossing from Libya or the Aegean from Turkey, seeking abode first in Italy or Turkey, then elsewhere. Europe watched—and was either sympathetic toward or alarmed by—terrible scenes of desperate crowds held back by razor-wire fences hastily erected by the Hungarian government, or taken to warehouses in Serbia, winding along the roads in Croatia where, two decades beforehand, indigenous refugees had fled shelling and “ethnic cleansing.” The Mediterranean from Libya and Aegean from Turkey became watery cemeteries as hundreds, maybe thousands, drowned. Europe faced a calamity, whether it knew it or not, whether it wanted to help or slam the door.

Maguire set out to go “back up the line” in January 2016— “The migrants had passed on, but I felt the distance”—in order to commence a series of paintings that ended in the ravages of Aleppo. “I went from Paris to Brindisi, then across to Athens and back through Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Austria, and Germany, to travel the route the migrants had taken. I didn’t meet that much, it provided very little direct material, but it was a necessary pilgrimage. This trip allowed me to look at the railway stations where people had been looked after, to see the North Africans in southern Italian car parks, panhandling the shoppers, and finally those sleeping rough in Paris.”

The result was the remarkable picture we see of a drowning man, conveyed both vertically and horizontally against the predatory sea that claims his life (p. 57).

But the news headlines screamed one source for this tide of misery above all others: the carnage in Syria. At the far end of the line, whence many of these desperate refugees came, was the nightmare that began to unfold in Syria from 2014, when—on the slipstream of the Arab Spring—rebels staged

Maguire painting Apartments Aleppo, 2016

an uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Though theirs was a democratic movement, they were conjoined by another—Islamist—insurrection. The regime’s response to both was savage, merciless, and continues at the time of this writing. Maguire’s was that first Apartments Aleppo—for the artist, an inadequate one, as he explains over pasta he has made in the Paris studio: “I know why I went to Syria. . . .

I had to see it to paint it, and because there was a familiarity as I came of age during what became the Northern Ireland

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civil war.” And this, our opening point about having to bear witness: because although the first painting is fine and vivid, “it was painted from a distance. I went to see the real thing, aghast, in 2016.” A point at which, reflects Maguire, “I realized: I don’t know how to paint the thing. I’ve never been there before, and I’ve never done it before.”

Maguire went to Syria with Colm Lynagh, a member of Hidden Voices, a republican group dedicated to conflict resolution in Ireland and internationally. The group also included reporters from the New York Times. Visas were granted by the Syrian Ministry of Tourism. While permission was needed for internal travel around Syria, once in the city of Aleppo Maguire and Lynagh were free to go wherever they wished with whomever they wished. Maguire said, “I spent the days in Aleppo in the east part of the city, which was destroyed by the fighting. Colm spoke with soldiers who were in isolated posts, and I spoke with university students, who gave me the history of the collapsed buildings.”

Regarding responsibility for the destruction, Maguire notes the famous quotation from Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, where Orwell says that in this (Spanish) civil war, he believes nothing of what he reads and only that which his own eyes show him, but then adds the caveat that he sees only a small fragment of what is—so even that is not to be trusted as overarching truth. So it is with Maguire on Syria. Only the destroyed architecture is true, and that is what he painted.

A winter sun sets—in February 2018—over the gardens and quadrangle of what was the Kilmainham military hospital in Dublin, and now houses the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The close of day is cold and bright, and the city happy: Ireland has beaten Wales and is clear top of the Six Nations rugby league. But news from Syria could not be worse: the weekend papers detail a merciless and murderous assault by Syrian artillery and Russian bombers against the rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta, with hundreds of civilians reported killed and hospitals targeted. There is talk of “the Srebrenica of the twenty-first century.” And there they are: the five paintings, three of them with a whitewashed room all to themselves,

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the silence of the bleached walls echoing that of the Syrian streets. When the exhibition opened, there were written protests by supporters of the rebel Free Syrian Army. Others from Aleppo and living in Dublin welcomed the showing of the paintings. Maguire hunches his shoulders, surrounded by his own work. “They’re like cadavers,” whispers Maguire.

“I see them as a dead organism.” The paintings are arranged in an order that puts Aleppo 5 at the end wall. There, a diagonal slide of masonry is ready to fall into the awful silence and break it—the building has not fallen yet, and we must be ready to jump, for a sudden crash. In this painting alone, a single figure dares emerge—the only sign of Maguire’s beloved, abused humanity in any of the series. He moves like a shadow, witness and survivor, but the building is still falling, like the whole world it represents.

Critics refer to Maguire’s style as “neo-Expressionist,” meaning, presumably, that his paintings stand in defiance of what another catalogue calls the “ragbag of postmodernism,” 8 favoring instead emotional gravitas and physical mass. Maguire, compelled toward the raw realities of violence, war, prisons, and mental institutions, describes himself in the negative, and wisely so, as “entirely outside that new British school of art which has left reality, [which is] all commodity. Whatever they are, I am not, and whatever they are not, I am. I am inspired by Goya and Géricault—what else can I say about what ‘kind’ of painter I am?” Maguire is substance, the real thing.

We are at lunch at a brasserie on Boulevard Raspail, where Samuel Beckett reportedly dined. Maguire, a messy eater, boasts that today not so much as a flake of his whitefish has landed on either his shirt or my omelet. “I feel fairly powerless as an individual,” he says, as we try to make some sense of this trajectory. “I’ve known people who exercise power, but I live in a state of powerlessness. We all have a responsibility, I think, to work in the space we can—I can choose to paint.”

Among Maguire’s closest friends is the man whose voice is emblematic of Irish song and singing these days, Christy Moore. Which is hardly surprising: Moore is an artist whose songs convey Ireland’s tribulations to the world, and brings

NOTES

those of the world to concerts around Ireland: from Chile to Derry and vice versa, songs brimful of what Maguire called, in another context, the “humanity of the prisoners and the inhumanity of the system.” But Moore recalls a concert during which, while he sang of tribulation and struggle, a man in the audience called out, “For Jaysus sake, Christy, will ye lighten up!” Maguire only rarely lightens up—but he did paint, during one of those stolen moments, a beautiful picture of a lily, for the cover of Christy Moore’s album of that name. It can be done: all of us who do war for a living accumulate an appalling beauty deficit, which demands repayment at some stage before it is too late—though Maguire shows little sign of clawing it back just yet. But for all his fascination with violence, Maguire is—like any decent war photographer or reporter who cares— ultimately a war artist whose war ends up being against war itself.

1 Lara Marlowe, “Lara Marlowe: An Irishwoman’s Diary on Paintings That Tell the Story of War,” Irish Times, August 5, 2017. https://www .irishtimes.com/opinion/lara-marlowe-an -irishwoman-s-diary-on-paintings-that-tell-the -story-of-war-1.3177082.

2 Marlowe, “Irishwoman’s Diary.”

3 Ed Vulliamy, Amexica: War along the Borderline, rev. ed. (New York: Picador, 2011).

4 Blood Rising, directed by Mark McLoughlin (2013).

5 Brian Maguire and Mark McLoughlin, Blood Rising Q&A, Curzon Cinemas, London, 2014.

6 Maguire and McLoughlin, Blood Rising Q&A. 7 Peter Finn and Sari Horwitz, “Justice Department Outlines HSBC Transactions with Drug Traffickers,” Washington Post, December 11, 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com /world/national-security/justice-department -outlines-hsbc-transactions-with-drug-traffickers /2012/12/11/1b8130c4-43bf-11e2-8061 -253bccfc7532_story.html?noredirect=on&utm _term=.8dabc45b8093.

8 Christian Viveros-Fauné, “The Part about Our Crimes: Mexico, Violence and the Art of Teresa Margolles and Brian Maguire,” in An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom, exh. cat. (Carlow, Ireland: Visual Centre for Contemporary Art and the George Bernard Shaw Theatre, 2012).

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Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, 2016 Acrylic on linen 114 ⅛ × 106 ¼ inches (290 × 270 cm) Tia Collection, Santa Fe

Maguire explains: “ ‘Over our heads the hollow

both horizontally, as he would be floating

seas closed up.’ It’s a quote from Primo Levi’s

perhaps ashore on a tide, but also vertically as

book If This Is a Man (1947). In Auschwitz,

the waters deepen, overcome his resistance

Levi had a job cleaning the huge barrel in

and breath, drag him down, engulf and

which petrol was kept. The very young man

kill him.

in charge of him was a laborer, who asked

Throughout the year 2015, the numbers

Levi to teach him Italian. And Levi used to

of refugees from war in Syria, and migrants

teach him cantos from Dante, translated,

from Africa and Asia, converging on Europe

which contained this phrase. I further related

swelled—those fleeing war, climate change,

this phrase to the moral dilemma Europe

or poverty, risking the Mediterranean crossing

faces with migration and connect it to Levi’s

from Libya or the Aegean from Turkey, seeking

statement that what Auschwitz taught him is

abode first in Italy or Turkey, then elsewhere.

that if you value things more than people, you

Maguire set out from Paris in January 2016

risk spiritual collapse.”

to retrace the routes of the migrants through

The dark turn in the shades of sea blue

southeastern and central Europe, including

brings this horrifying depiction of a drowning

train stations, Italian car parks, and the streets

refugee into a third dimension: we see him

of Paris.

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57

Mexican Necklace, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 52 × 72 inches (132 × 183 cm) Tia Collection, Santa Fe

In the background, a handsome colonial

hung as though on a washing line—but it

building, but hung out in front of it are the

could also be some forensic laboratory, in

faces of some of the forty-three students

which the Mexican authorities cooked the

who vanished after being fired upon in Iguala

reasons for the students’ disappearance,

when they went off to a demonstration. The

as they were found by the Organization of

“necklace” was made as a protest by families,

American States to have done.

relatives, and supporters of the students,

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59

The Known Dead, 2015 Acrylic on linen 55 ⅛ × 78 ¾ inches (140 × 200 cm)

A painting that connects Maguire’s work in

poignant take on that same theme, but six

the deserts of what I call “Amexica,” astride

months earlier, and from another sea—that of

the frontier, and his next major theme: the

parched rock and sand across which hundreds

mass movement of people across perilous

of thousands of people from Latin and Central

terrain and water, of migration and the flight

America make their way to “El Norte.” Some

of refugees. The attention of the world was—

make it; others don’t. “It’s figures lying abject

albeit briefly—touched and haunted by a

on the ground, dead,” he says, “kissing the

photograph of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, a

ground. A painting based on a published

Syrian refugee, drowned off the Turkish coast

image of five immigrants who died in the

near the resort of Bodrum in 2014. His brother

desert while trying to reach the USA. They

Ghalib and mother, Rihanna, also drowned.

were murdered. Although this work was

The image was used by cartoon artist Chris

completed six months prior to the death of the

Riddell to accompany British prime minister

young boy from Syria, this work is seen in the

David Cameron’s description of migrants

context of that child’s death.”

and refugees as a “swarm.” This is Maguire’s

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61

Grow House 2, 2015 Acrylic on linen 55 ⅛ × 78 ¾ inches (140 × 200 cm)

Above and opposite are two of four paintings

killings in the so‑called drug war. My thesis is

of a marijuana grow house, Maguire says,

that the decision of the U.S. government early

“based on a photographic study of a grow

in the twentieth century to declare narcotics

house sent anonymously to me. I wanted to

illegal is what created the conditions for

do these pictures because I felt they showed

murder.” The last of the four, Grow House 4,

clearly the impossibility of the plant being

“is very abstract in that it veers to the

responsible for, or indeed involved in, the

description of a mood, rather than an object.”

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Grow House 4, 2015 Acrylic on linen 63 × 59 inches (160 × 150 cm)

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Cocaine Laundry: Wachovia, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 9 ⅞ × 11 ¾ inches (25 × 30 cm) Private Collection, Phoenix

The laundering of the profits of narco-traffic

pay a fine amounting to a tiny percentage

through and from Mexico has formed a

of its annual turnover. No one went to jail.

major part of my work over the past decade,

The same is true of HSBC, the British-based

and many discussions with Maguire. The

biggest bank in Europe.

systematic acceptance of drug—and thereby

Maguire here depicts this outrage in the

blood—money by mainstream banks is in

clearest way possible. A simple and brilliant

a way the most grotesque aspect of this

idea: to show packages of cocaine, stamped

scourge, since it blurs entirely the line

with the bank’s all-too-familiar logos. He

between what is deemed criminal and what is

adds, “HSBC is significant in that the bank was

ostensibly “legal”—it exposes what I call the

set up to launder cash from the opium trade

Lie of Legality. My book Amexica exposed the

Britain conducted in China. The first drug

discovery by U.S. federal authorities that the

war took place when the British government

Wachovia bank, now part of the bailed-out

invaded China in order to safeguard its

Wells Fargo, had handled hundreds of millions

capacity to sell opium to Chinese addicts,

of dollars in inadequately monitored money

which was grown by British aristocracy in

from Mexico. But Wachovia was able just to

British India.”

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Cocaine Laundry: HSBC, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 17 ⅞ × 14 inches (45.5 × 35.5 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

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Installation view of Cocaine Laundry (2015) in J’Accuse at Void, Derry, November 28, 2015–February 6, 2016

66

67

Massacre (Nuevo Laredo), 2014 Acrylic on linen 114 ⅛ × 104 ⅜ inches (290 × 265 cm)

This is the painting Maguire created from

Maguire says, “The photograph I used for

a series of photographs I sent him after

the painting is that of the bodies laid out in a

obtaining them from a colleague on the

temporary mortuary, near the find. What took

Houston Chronicle, who had in turn been

my interest was the bottle of formaldehyde

leaked them by Mexican authorities. They

used to spray the bodies; it was placed where

were among the most horrific images I have

we normally find some kind of statue or

ever seen: a truck full of butchered human

religious object. In its way for me, it signified

bodies, mutilated and later laid out on a

the absence of God in this story—only flesh,

tarpaulin. No one ever printed these pictures,

men as meat.” Perhaps the way painting

or made them public, and it was certainly

requires the action of the painter’s hand,

not for me to do so. But I thought that from

employed across a specific time, allows images

the hands of the painter, some important

like this to be rendered in a way that contains

statement would emerge, on that “style”

and yet transcends the horror.

of killing.

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Nature Morte (1), 2014 Acrylic on canvas 69 ¼ × 54 ½ inches (176 × 138.5 cm)

Maguire painted the series shown on pages 71 to 77 while working “embedded” at the daily newspaper El Norte in Ciudad Juárez.

They demonstrated that “style” of violence of which the anthropologist Cecilia Ballí spoke,

“Nature Morte (4) shows one of two men killed, then brought to a square and posed.

“Nature Morte (6) shows bits of the man placed along the street.

“Decapitation is a hallmark of executions

which characterized—and characterizes—

in Mexico, and Nature Morte (7) is taken from

Mexico’s war.

an image given to me by an El Norte staff

Maguire explains: “In Nature Morte (1),

photographer showing the decapitated and

all the signifier elements—such as police tape,

dismembered body of a man in the yard of a

onlookers, cops, and their cars—are removed.

forensic mortuary. I painted his head, as to do

I dwelt only on the body. This work was begun

more seemed disrespectful. I found the act of

in Idaho, and finished in Paris.

making this painting oddly very meditative.”

70

71

Nature Morte (4), 2014 Acrylic on linen 98 ⅜ × 70 ⅞ inches (250 × 180 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

72

Nature Morte (6), 2014 Acrylic on linen 43 ¼ × 86 ⅝ inches (110 × 220 cm)

74

75

Nature Morte (7), 2014 Acrylic on linen 59 Ă— 63 inches (150 Ă— 160 cm)

76

77

78

79

Police Graduation 2012 (Juárez), 2014 Acrylic on linen 118 ⅛ × 157 ½ inches (300 × 400 cm) Christian Groenke and Gulia Bruckmann

Maguire makes no excuses or apologies for

graduating. The salute, a version of which was

capitalizing on the fact that this—the raised

made synonymous in the 1930s with the Nazis,

left arm—remains the duty salute of the

was never changed since the 1940s, whereas

Mexican police, and on that of our automatic,

most countries did get a new salute, like the

preconceived association with that particular

U.S. hand across the heart, which distanced

gesture. As Mexico’s carnage descends into

it from the Nazi one. Not so in Mexican police

the abyss, the police plays its role, enmeshed

rituals. The image all too clearly signals the

at federal, state, and municipal levels with

lack of democratic control which allowed the

the narco-trafficking cartels with which it is

police to kill forty-three left-wing student

supposed to be at war.

teachers in 2014.”

“This was one of the images I found in the El Norte newspaper archive,” explains Maguire. “It’s of the preventive police,

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81

Cardona Bridge (Juárez), 2012 Acrylic on linen 82 ⅝ × 66 ⅞ inches (210 × 170 cm) Private Collection, Hope, Idaho

Here is Mexico’s national symbol, and the story of the Aztec myth of the foundation of their capital, Tenochtitlan—now Mexico City: it was built where an eagle was seen eating a serpent, perched on a cactus. Maguire paints it as an icon of how Mexico sees itself, with a twist: “This image is from the Mexican statue on the bridge between Juárez and El Paso.” What is Mexico and what is the USA is confusing.

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Guadalupe Verónica Castro was kidnapped on March 4, 1996. She was seventeen years old when she was killed.

Her mother, Maria Consuelo Paula Hernandez, moved to Juárez when Verónica was seven years old. Verónica was thirteen when she started to work, faking her age by saying she was older. She worked for three years before she went missing. Her goal was to help her mother, so she chose to give up an education after primary school in order to work. She always gave her full paycheck to Maria Consuelo—all she asked for was twenty pesos for a burger and for her mother to buy her Pantene Shampoo.

Verónica was kidnapped and abused for twenty-one days.

She had been drugged and hadn’t been fed. Her torturers cut off her left breast. Her body was found in the Lomas de Poleo body dump. Her mother believed that Verónica had been buried alive.

Guadalupe Verónica Castro, 2012 Acrylic on canvas 32 ¼ × 30 inches (82 × 76 cm) Christian Groenke and Gulia Bruckmann

86

87

Rubí Marisol Fraire Escobedo, sixteen years old, was the daughter of Marisela Escobeda Ortiz. She was killed in June 2009 in Ciudad Chihuahua. The young girl’s partner, Sergio Barraza, admitted the killing and brought the police to where her body was buried. At trial, Barraza retracted his confession, citing torture, and he was released. A week later, Marisela was protesting outside the Courts of Justice in the center of Ciudad Chihuahua late in the evening when a man emerged from a white car and, after exchanging a few words with her, followed her into the street and shot her dead. Over the next few days, her family members were threatened, her partners’ business was burnt, and one member was killed. After the funeral, her family fled Chihuahua to the United States, where they now have been granted asylum.

Rubí Marisol Fraire Escobedo, 2012 Acrylic on canvas 16 ⅛ × 12 ¼ inches (41 × 31 cm) Christian Groenke and Gulia Bruckmann

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89

Brenda Berenice Castillo García at sixteen years of age lived with her mother and worked in a factory in Juárez, Mexico, making electrical car harnesses. All was well up to the time her pregnancy began to show. Contrary to the laws of Mexico and the European Union, she was sacked because of her pregnancy. A month after Kevin was born in 2009, she traveled by bus to the center of Juárez to seek work in a jewelry store. She disappeared that day and has never been seen since. Her mother, Bertha Alicia, found the investigation into her disappearance to be nonexistent. Her mother’s frantic efforts to find her daughter resulted in death threats and the family having to continually change their address. The family held on to hope for two years, but this was undermined when Brenda’s clothes were found with a dozen other female remains in a body dump outside Juárez in February 2012.

In 2014, a number of people were charged with trafficking and murder in connection with the 2012 find. It was alleged that the other dead women and Brenda had been trafficked by a gang into a prison. The warder and others in the prison administration were also to be charged with trafficking women for the purposes of prostitution. No one from the prison was ever charged. Brenda’s family believe that the author or authors of this crime have not been charged and therefore reject the trial as a resolution of her case.

Brenda Berenice Castillo García, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 28 × 21 ⅝ inches (71 × 55 cm) Christian Groenke and Gulia Bruckmann

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Maguire and I met over his work in Ciudad

Such a situation could only draw

Juárez, Mexico, for many years the most

Maguire’s curiosity and revulsion after his

dangerous city in the world, and where our

experiences in Ireland and Brazil. But in

paths crossed, unbeknownst to each other.

addition to his handling of the feminocidio and

(We found we had made mutual friends.) The

exploration of Mexico’s violence, as explained,

city had burgeoned with the building of so-

Maguire’s work with the mothers and children

called maquiladora assembly plants, making

of the murdered women of Juárez testifies

electronic and household goods for the U.S.

perhaps more than any other work to his idea

automobile and other industries, employing

of painting as an exchange with the subject,

people—mostly young women—who came

rather than an appropriation by the artist.

from the desperately poor Mexican interior

These portraits of murdered young women

and south, settling with their families in the

(pp. 87–91) are as powerfully arresting as

vast city sprawl of shanty barrios without basic

they are poignant—and what we see is one

services or schooling.

of a pair in each case. Maguire’s “return” for

I first went to report the feminocidio—the

painting them was to give a second portrait

mass abduction, violation, torture, and murder

to the mother, as described above, and to

of young women—in Juárez during the 1990s,

teach painting and drawing classes to the

when the city was also a theater for a first

children of the dead women. “It’s a sharing

round of violence related to drug trafficking,

of the work,” reflects Maguire. “You cannot

before the carnage unleashed across Mexico

just come in, paint, and leave. The length of

from 2006. As the anthropologist Cecilia

time of this engagement was over a period

Ballí explained to me, the way in which the

of eight to ten years, of my physical presence

women were murdered with ultraviolence and

there and keeping in touch. And this work

maximum sadistic cruelty was prescient of the

had to be done carefully. In some cases, it was

“style” of killing that characterizes the narco

impossible to return to the areas where the

war—“and I don’t use the word ‘style’ lightly,”

women lived, because to do so would bring the

she emphasized.

cartels down on the family.”

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Film still from Blood Rising, 2013, directed by Mark McLoughlin

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Seed Corn Is Not for Harvesting 6, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 18 ⅛ × 15 inches (46 × 38 cm) Private Collection, Navan, Ireland

Maguire says, “The title is a quote from Goethe, cited by Käthe Kollwitz when her son was killed in World War I. And it refers here to twenty young boys killed in a gangland feud in the Crumlin / Drimnagh area of Dublin over twelve years. These are the invisible boys, the new cannon fodder. Kollwitz is the link, from the invisible boys of the front to the invisible kids of Dublin, London, wherever.”

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95

O’Neill Family Racing, 2010 Acrylic on canvas 23 ⅝ × 28 ¾ inches (60 × 73 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

In north Idaho, there is an annual demolition

the end, a cousin drove it, but failed to make

derby at the county fairgrounds in Sandpoint.

any impact. Nancy talked a little with the mum,

The cars competing are mostly local, but

who was very impressive. Alcoholism, the

some come across the border from Canada.

culture of poverty, and American nationalism

“One such car,” says Maguire, “was parked

come together with the story of this woman

waiting for the competitions to begin, and

who manages to keep it all together. Their

Nancy Kienholz and I noticed the absolute

name was O’Neill, the same name as the

disappointment of a young boy upon

Speaker in Congress for many years. It

discovering that his dad was too drunk to drive.

was these two different identities—this

The boy had painted the car with the family

coincidence—that gave me the idea to paint

name, its address, and various slogans. He had

the scene of the car, since not all O’Neills were

expected his dad to win the prize money. In

successful and wealthy. Others struggled.”

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Railway Junction, Turin, 2011 Acrylic on linen 31 ½ × 55 ⅛ inches (80 × 140 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

97

Contemporary Ruin, 2010 Acrylic on linen 82 ¾ × 57 ½ inches (210 × 146 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

Here, Maguire paints the shell of the

greedy people. I’m using what the structure

headquarters of the Anglo-Irish Bank in

itself tells us about the crash of 2008. It shows

Dublin, with its hollow-eyed, missing windows,

the stalled building of the Anglo-Irish Bank

a concrete skeleton representing the skeleton

headquarters. Stalled by bankruptcy, it’s a

of the interests it was built for. “It’s based

ruin. Normally, to get a ruin like this, you need

on an image printed in the front page of

a war. The Anglo-Irish Bank did this to itself.

the international New York Times,” says

It created its own ruin, and ruined the country

Maguire. “But it has a wider context, and as a

and the lives of its people as well. The bank’s

painter, you look for an image that carries the

own ruin is a symbol of what it achieved.

history—the before, during, and after—in this

The title is ironic in that the words usually

case, the wrecking of the Irish economy by

contradict one another, but not in this case.”

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People’s Palace, 2010 Acrylic on canvas 15 × 18 ⅛ inches (38 × 46 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

This painting becomes more poignant

“This is the European Parliament,” says

with time, as the abomination of “Brexit”

Maguire. “I wanted to paint it in order to

continues on its course, and Eastern European

take a stand for Europe before Brexit. At

countries continue to defy Brussels over the

the beginning of the crisis in 2011, I still

accommodation of refugees and migrants.

saw the EU [European Union] as a force

Here are three masts with Europe’s flag, that

for hope, and trust that it will become

of the continent’s union and unity, slowly

a people’s democracy.”

unfurling—there’s a wind blowing, perhaps an ill wind, but it can’t quite unfurl the flag.

100

Prison Yard, 2010 Acrylic on canvas 57 ⅛ × 34 ¼ inches (145 × 87 cm)

Heart of a Heartless World (Metropolitan Cathedral of Chihuahua, Mexico), 2010 86 ⅝ × 82 ⅝ inches (220 × 210 cm) Private Collection, Hope, Idaho

There’s a rare peace in this painting, an

furniture lightly. They reminded me of their

elegance of form and mood—a stolen

counterparts in the Northern Hemisphere,

peace, as we share the relief of faith among

in a department store looking for the bits

Mexicans as they balance out the struggle

and pieces with which to make their lives

of their daily lives with a vivacity and charm

together. It then struck me that here in the

that few write about or record, and with the

cathedral was the sole residue of hope in

sanctuaries their churches—and especially

Chihuahua, which is what Marx was claiming

their cathedrals—have become. “I went inside

in that famous statement about religion

the cathedral in Ciudad Chihuahua, state

being the opium of the people, the heart of

capital of Chihuahua,” recalls Maguire. “I saw

a heartless world.”

a young couple walking about, touching the

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Each One Diminishes Us All 2, 2010 Acrylic on canvas 32 ¼ × 68 ⅛ inches (82 × 173 cm) Christian Groenke and Gulia Bruckmann

A statement as much in the title as the image: murder in Mexico, drug addiction for fun and out of desperation in Europe and America, the money here too. As the Mexicans themselves say, No más muertes—no more murders— knowing there will be more, endlessly.

Maguire allows his title to do the work: “It’s a painting of a body lying in the street.”

104

105

Courtyard, Warsaw Tenement, 2009 Acrylic on linen 68 ⅞ × 54 ¾ inches (175 × 139 cm) Collection Wicklow County Council, Ireland

The project was a public art commission called

Tallaght, a western suburb of Dublin. Each visit

Home, which involved Maguire’s response to

resulted in a painting or series of paintings.

the influx of people to Ireland from all over

The painting opposite is of Warsaw. The

the world during the boom years prior to

work was published and the images remade

2008. He decided to visit the cities from which

as lithographs to hang in local schools. The

immigrants had come to a mountain village

purpose was to challenge the xenophobia

south of Dublin. The cities were Yaoundé,

always below the surface in Irish society.

Tokyo, Warsaw, and Brussels, as well as

106

Stairwell, Trauma Treatment Centre, Yaoundé, Cameroon, 2007 Acrylic on linen 81 ½ × 60 ⅝ inches (207 × 154 cm) Collection Wicklow County Council, Ireland

108

Have You Insurance?, 2008 Acrylic on linen 81 ⅞ × 57 ½ inches (208 × 146 cm)

110

Mother, 2008 Acrylic on canvas 25 × 21 inches (63.5 × 53.5 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

A famous portrait by Boccioni of his mother

glimpse into a world of depression and upset

shows her full face and at full strength, hands

in the mind of the one woman to which all

slammed down on a table. Maguire paints his

men turn for reassurance—there is none here.

mother with a number of blues in common

Of his painting, Maguire says only this: “My

with Boccioni’s palette, but to exact opposite

mother’s life was plagued by mental illness.

effect: here, she is bereft, and the color is

I was asked to paint a picture of depression.

cold, with all it means when we talk about

I painted my mother. I continually painted my

“the blues”—and worse. The sickly yellow in

mother—this is the most recent. She’s always

Kathleen Maguire’s eyes gives us a poignant

been . . . I don’t know what to say.”

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113

Middleton Triptych, 2008 a. Republican Plot 1920s b. Housing Estate 1970s c. Suicide Row 2000s Acrylic on canvas Each: 18 ⅛ × 15 inches (46 × 38 cm) Private Collection

There is an aesthetic mercilessness to this

and the flagpole is sober. At the other, far

triad of works: the sparse near-monochrome

end are the graves of the contemporary

of the Republican Plot, the bland slab of

young men, who committed suicide over

the Housing Estate—and the flowers of

three years at the end of the 1990s. And in

tribute cowering beneath a giant darkness

between is one reason: the housing estate,

in Suicide Row. This is “a painting of modern

built without a soul, without a cinema, without

Ireland and its failure to deliver any kind

shops—without hope. So this painting is about

of future to its young people. It starts with

sacrifice for Ireland, and the failure of Ireland.

the flagpole: a commentary on the death of

Young people dying over the same number

nineteen volunteers who died fighting for the

of years—at different periods, for different

independence of Ireland between 1918 and

reasons.” It is a portrait of the failure of the

1921. The style of the layout of the graveyard

Free State of Ireland.

114

Dayrle: Resident of Texas Death Row, 2008 Acrylic on canvas 48 ⅜ × 55 ⅛ inches (123 × 140 cm) Christian Groenke and Gulia Bruckmann

115

Guest Worker, 2007 Acrylic on canvas 76 × 55 ⅛ inches (193 × 140 cm) Private Collection, Los Angeles

Maguire explains: “This is an immigrant worker. He has no privates, because his wife is not allowed to join him; he cannot be a father or husband. He has no voice, because he cannot vote. But he is worth his weight in gold to the economy, so he is on the weighing scales. Yes, he is valuable, but only for the work he does.”

116

117

Nairobi Slum Clearance 28 / 1 / 07, 2007 Acrylic on canvas 82 ⅝ × 70 ⅞ inches (210 × 180 cm) Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

In 2007, Maguire, then a professor of fine art

the following day to defend the title to their

in the National College of Art and Design in

homes. At two in the morning, they set fires to

Dublin, took a student group to the World

stop the machines. In the morning, the artist

Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. While they

Dominic Thorpe photographed the results and

were there, the homes of local people were

the BBC World Service broadcast the screams

bulldozed overnight to attempt to clear them

of the residents. Maguire made the painting

from a site on which they had lived for twenty-

from Thorpe’s photographs, and the title of

five years, in order to make way for a hotel

the painting incorporates the date of the event

development. The families were due in court

and the broadcast.

118

Dr. Salvador Allende 11 / 9 / 73, 2007

We are unused to seeing the Chilean Socialist

Allende the victorious Socialist rather than

Acrylic on linen

president Salvador Allende in such a boldly

the deposed Allende. Looking into the future

63 ¾ × 60 ⅝ inches (162 × 154 cm)

positive depiction, bright palette and eyes—

without knowing what it had in store for him.

Private Collection, Mexico City

conditioned as his memory is by his deposition

His death was an event that showed the naked

and murder by the military coup of General

power of capitalism.”

Augusto Pinochet in 1973, the defining political moment of this day in the Americas.

“I created this portrait from newsreel clips of his successful presidential campaign, so it is

120

Patrice Lumumba 17 / 1 / 61, 2007 Acrylic on linen 23 ⅝ × 23 ⅝ inches (60 × 60 cm) Private Collection, Cork

After Allende, here is the other of two

faced with the ambitions of military chief

been allowed to develop African democracy,

paintings, as Maguire says, “of elected

Joseph-Désiré Mobutu—who held ties to

there would be prosperity and peace.” In this

presidents whose death was ordered by

Belgium and U.S. intelligence—Lumumba

second portrait, the subject is more haunted

U.S. presidents.” Patrice Lumumba was

was abandoned by America and the United

than in that of Allende—as though his fate

the Pan-Africanist prime minister of the

Nations, imprisoned by President Joseph

were foretold, his arm constrained behind him

Democratic Republic of Congo for six months

Kasa-Vubu, and executed—and so began the

into the background of camouflage colors.

in 1960, on a hinge between subjugation to

carnage and tribulation that has continued

Both these works, adds Maguire, “are based

Belgium and independence. He attempted

ever since. “There are still battles today in

on filmed interviews of the relevant retired

a neutral stance in the Cold War, but when

this area,” says Maguire, “where if he had

U.S. ambassadors.”

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My Friend Eddie, 2007 Charcoal on paper 18 ½ × 14 ⅝ inches (47 × 37 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

This is Eddie Cahill, one of Maguire’s star

ended with twenty dead. It was fucking crazy.”

But I was painting—I’d start at eight in the

pupils in Portlaoise Prison, now an exhibited

As to his own engagement in robbery, Eddie

evening and finish at eight in the morning.”

artist in his own right. Once a gangland bank

adds: “I knew I was doing wrong. I was looking

Then Eddie “discovered charcoal, and they

robber, now the toast of his own exhibition at

for a way out. But there is none: everything

were prepared to let me alone with that.”

the Origin Gallery in Dublin. He is sketched

is ‘Go for it!’—it wears the leather off your

After three weeks like this, Eddie “was off the

here in charcoal, eyes deep with memory and

shoe.” The point of departure is always the

fucking wall,” and “I decided to learn to do this

inner visions, but his mouth is blurred, as

same, says Eddie: “Once a twelve- or thirteen-

properly, to learn to draw. Maguire went to art

though Eddie cannot quite speak all he knows.

year-old takes a criminal turn, there’s no way

college to learn how to draw properly, so I had

But one September lunchtime, we fathomed

back. Once you’ve had a conversation with

to start here.”

the story behind this picture.

one of those kids, you may as well have had a

Eddie arrives to check the hanging of

Maguire “has technique, but he’s a

thousand.” Eddie’s generation was, he says,

motivator as well as a teacher. He’d do

his paintings in time for the private view

“being educated for the dole. And we thought,

something, and we’d watch. Then I’d do

and opening. Maguire peruses the work and

fuck this, and went after everybody. We’d rob

something, and show it to him. And he’d tell

suggests a change. It is haunting stuff: his

that bank over there and put the money into

you: how to use shading, hatching—he’d tell

figures seem to entwine Bernard Buffet and

that bank over there. Causing havoc.”

us not to copy him, but use the technique to

A Clockwork Orange. Two pictures meditate

Eddie himself “got to Portlaoise in 1992,

do ideas of our own. If we got too clever, he’d

on the disappeared during Ireland’s Troubles

and I heard about these art classes. But inside

say, ‘You’re going fucking soft.’” Eddie shows

and gang wars: a lone figure against a

jail, our rules do not change—prison education

some charcoal drawings on his telephone;

shoreline and threatening sea that is more

was considered part of the system, and it was

one especially sensitive portrait is of an

thematic than literal, looking for someone

against our rules, as you’d be cooperating.

African woman “who was visiting her mother

who will never be found. “It’s happening in

And I was never going to break the rules.”

in hospital, dying of cancer, and when she

the criminal underworld,” says Eddie. “It’s

Then someone explained that “it wasn’t part

went home, her crazy son was waiting for her

happening everywhere in the world.” Then

of the prison education system, it’s someone

in the garden, and killed her. She was a soft

he smiles, and paraphrases John Lennon: “An

coming in from outside. So I thought, okay,

woman”—as the portrait shows—“and he

underground hero is something to be!” Which

I’ll have a look at this. And Maguire comes in.

killed her.”

is, in a way, what he has become. “Nowadays

And I say: ‘But where’s the art teacher?’ He

I’m drinking wine with the people I used to

looked like another fucking prisoner. So I went

what I was doing before with bank robberies,

tie up!”

down to the art room with him—hang on, I

I was doing with paint. I realized that it

But he still eats a sandwich lunch too,

It reached a point, says Eddie, “where

thought, there’s a tinge of collaboration here.

wasn’t just the villains who were robbing, it

and we adjourn for one around the corner.

So I hung back, I waited for a few lessons,

was everybody—the rich too, in their way.

Eddie Cahill’s route to Portlaoise began with

watching him working, making magic little

Rich bankers, poor bank robbers and drug

his métier of bank robber in a period before

marks. I was amazed—and he seemed sound,

dealers—all the same. Look at these kids

the emergence of some of the most violent

like a cuckoo in someone else’s nest—plus the

now: they can hardly write, but they can do

criminal wars in any European city. “It was

screws [prison guards] didn’t like him, and

all the maths in their heads, the logistics, the

this bad: there was a feud between two

that was good enough for me.”

distribution. But for me now, it’s all coming

local gangs, and a cousin of one of the gang

Even so, Eddie “started by nicking

out in the painting, instead of violence.” And

members was going out with this young girl.

brushes and paints to hide under the bed and

yet, he reflects, “it’s pissing in the wind, I know

The censure of his gang went so far that they

work back in the cells. It’s hard to paint in front

that. I don’t care if I don’t sell; it’s a bonus if I

went after her grandmother, and killed her.

of everybody, and I didn’t want to be seen as

do. I’d do it for nothing. I paint because I have

That how wide the violence got. It had started

part of it. It was a risk, because they might

to—I couldn’t not do it.”

with a fella kicking over a motorbike, and

think I was painting over holes in the walls.

122

123

Naked Academic, 2006 Acrylic on linen 63 ¾ × 51 ⅛ inches (162 × 130 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

124

In Police Custody, Brooklyn, 2007 Acrylic on canvas 70 × 54 ⅜ inches (178 × 138 cm)

125

The Fairgreen Project, 2004 Mixed media on paper Each: 22 × 30 inches (56 × 76 cm)

Feelings of compassion, affection, and wit

provided by the Galway Arts Centre, always

infuse these portraits. This series dates from

smoking and sometimes sober, these men told

a project undertaken over the summer of

me of their friends who had died in the streets.

2004 in Galway, whereby Maguire was asked

The conversations were mostly joyous, as

by the social worker in the Fairgreen shelter

fond memories were discussed. The odd small

for homeless people to construct a process

photo was produced, and borrowed during the

through which current residents could grieve

chat.” In the end, Maguire showed a series of

for those former residents who had died.

drawings of the dead and the living side by

Maguire drew both these deceased and those

side in the arts center. The Fairview residents

who told him their story. “In a downtown room

“attended with pride.”

126

127

Citizen Geel: Safety, 2003 Lithograph, edition of 10 30 × 41 ⅜ inches (76 × 105 cm) Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum, Geel, Belgium

In 2003, Maguire was awarded a public art

sited in the hospital and in public buildings in

commission by the Belgian government to

Geel to reflect the way in which, for hundreds

produce artwork in collaboration with the

of years, this community had cared for

patients of the newly built OPZ psychiatric

patients in their own homes. Indeed, many

hospital in Geel. He led art classes with the

patients came from other parts of Belgium

hospital’s art therapists, and the patients

to live out their lives in family care in Geel.

produced images based on significant events

The essential kindness that underlined these

in their lives. Maguire reproduced twelve of

centuries of care is testament to what a senior

these images as lithographs with Jacques de

OPZ psychiatrist, Dr. Lode Weyns, stated:

Champfleury in Paris. The lithos were then

“Sometimes the patient cures the society.”

128

Citizen Geel: Hospital, 2003 Lithograph, edition of 10 30 × 41 ⅜ inches (76 × 105 cm) Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum, Geel, Belgium

129

Elizabeth, 2003 Acrylic on canvas 72 × 53 inches (183 × 134.5 cm) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

A rare portrait of the coronation of a British

the coronation of Elizabeth, I saw the power

monarch by an Irish republican: Queen

differential between a young woman and

Elizabeth II in 1953. “It’s from the front

those attending her, all in their seventies.

page of the Los Angeles Times the day after

Maybe my reading makes more sense today.”

she was crowned. I was hunting historical images which explained more than the story, something bigger than the story. In this,

130

Bitter Fruit, 2003 Lithograph, edition of 3 55 ⅛ × 37 ⅜ inches (140 × 95 cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of Sharon and Gus Kopriva

The two layers of this monochrome scene

to serve effectively as a fund-raiser. It was

combine to depict, but somehow separate,

the last print Maguire made in a partnership

the appalling cruelty of the murderous crowd

in Paris with lithographer Jacques de

and its quarry. It’s an inversion of Rembrandt’s

Champfleury. “It’s based on an image taken

technique in his series of etchings Christ

from a book of images of lynchings. There is

Presented to the People (1655)—a distinction

very little difference between what the white

between those baying for his death and their

supremacists did on these occasions and what

victim, as though to emphasize the barbarity

the Mexican cartels do with their bodies—it’s

of the former and dignity of the latter. The

a public exhibition of death, the spectacle

faces of the killers are either focused hate or—

of death.”

on the left—perversely delirious.

This print was a response to a commission

by Amnesty International, but was too cruel

132

Apagados, 2003 Acrylic on paper Each: 22 × 30 inches (56 × 76 cm)

A combination of portraits that invite us to

fighters for the Communist groups. There’s a

make comparisons and contrasts—of mood,

homeless woman from São Paulo, and a young

palette—and the differences between all

Christian fighter. And a guy who was [former

of us. The grim determination of some, and

president] Lula’s right-hand man in the trade

disarming dignity of the woman at center

union movement, who said, when I painted

bottom. They hold and keep us with their

him: ‘You will paint the face of a killer’—he

stares, with an intensity that leads us to

was proud of his guerrilla days. The last of the

trust and admire them, but know not why. In

nine is a young woman who disappeared.”

the artist’s eye, they are all connected, and

While he was working in the studio,

gathered here for a reason. “Apagodos means

adds Maguire, “a group of security men and

erased,” says Maguire. “The first groups were

a policeman started killing homeless men

those murdered by the fascist dictatorship,

(seven) who slept rough in that area, using a

then their surviving colleagues who came to

boat hook as a weapon.”

terms with the torture they received, then

The project is a collaboration with Mudança

the homeless, the imprisoned, the socially

de Cena, a nonprofit civil society organization

kidnapped or otherwise disappeared, the

whose mission is the promotion of human rights,

criminal gang member. I painted the dead

citizenship, and sociocultural protagonism

near-monochrome, and the living in full

through artistic and educational actions.

color, in a studio overlooking the Praça da Sé in São Paulo.”

There are nine of them: “six from political resistance—four of whom are dead—and three from the social reality. You have two

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Bayview Project: Billboard, 20th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, 2001/3 Digital print billboard 20 × 60 feet (610 × 1830 cm)

Maguire echoed his Loyalist billboard idea

the prisoners’ right to show their work was

(Belfast Project, 1999; p. 143) after working

reestablished. We put a billboard at the end of

for short periods over two and a half years

the street where the women were being held,

in the Bayview women’s prison at Chelsea

advertising the show. In America, you can put

in Lower Manhattan, New York. “I had

up a billboard for a gun show, but my project

led the class of women through a process

showing art by prisoners was considered

whereby they painted their life stories, while

subversive. The project met the criteria of

I painted portraits of them,” says Maguire.

introducing the fact of the women’s prison to

“And halfway through the project, the state

the art world of Chelsea and the fact of art to

government in Albany decreed that prisoners

the women held in the prison.”

in New York State would no longer be allowed

Maguire notes that the prisoners were

to exhibit their work in public—only inside

either young black women held for two to

the prisons. An exhibition of prisoners’

three years for, at worst, fist-fighting, or older,

work in the state Capitol building, called

middle-aged black women held for twenty

Corrections on Canvas, was canceled. The

years and more for capital offenses against

gallery White Box was to show both portraits

abusive partners.

and the work of the women, but was told that this was not possible. The gallery issued notice that it would sue the governor. The press picked up on the situation, and—in an election year—it became an election issue, and the authorities, not wanting in New York to be seen as illiberal, withdrew the ban, and

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Bayview Project, 2002 Acrylic on paper Each: 30 × 22 inches (76 × 56 cm)

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Male Figure, 2001 Acrylic on paper 47 ¼ × 34 ⅞ inches (120 × 88.5 cm) Michael and Orlaith Traynor, Bray, Ireland

“Here is a man, and here is a woman. It’s about a married couple. They are in the same space, but they are missing each other. They are open to one another, but they miss each other.

It was to be one of a series I never did.”

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Belfast Project: Ex-Combatants, Shankill Road, Belfast, 1999 Digital print poster 23 × 33 inches (58.5 × 84 cm)

Not a painting but a painting of paintings—

was that they didn’t mind me painting the

portraits of Ulster Loyalist gunmen and

prisoners, but they didn’t want any kind of

their supporters. The UDA collaboration

public display. They wanted these men to

took the form of a large billboard placed on

disappear, even though some of them had

Newtownards Road in East Belfast and the

been elected to the new assembly.”

UVF was a smaller fly-poster on the Shankill

Catholics who came to the exhibition

Road in Belfast. The Belfast Project was to

“were astounded that I’d worked with Michael

become one of his most controversial projects.

Stone,” says Maguire of one of his subjects.

“The Good Friday Agreement signified

Stone was one of a notorious unit of sectarian

the end of the armed conflict. I worked in

killers called the Graveyard Gang, run by a

Long Kesh—which was to shut down in six

British MI5 agent. “People just didn’t get why

months—with Loyalist and republican

I’d want to be associated with a man like that,

paramilitaries, painting them and teaching

paint his portrait. But I painted him because

a little. There was a deal, but no peace yet.

he was there.”

The deal seemed to be if you stop pulling

The result was Maguire’s idea for a

the trigger outside the jail, your men will be

billboard showing Stone and seven other

released from prison.

Loyalist leaders, posted on Newtownards

“I grew up watching television pictures of

Road, their heartland—“their homecoming

parades after the Korean War, children waving

parade at the end of their war.” Only it wasn’t:

banners when their soldiers came home from

Stone was arrested again in 2006 for trying to

the war. And I thought: maybe I can contribute

enter the Stormont parliament to assassinate

something like that in Belfast, when these

Sinn Féin leaders Martin McGuinness and

men come home to their communities. I

Gerry Adams. (In an odd twist, Stone’s

discussed this with the officials of the British

defense at his trial was that the attack was

government. They were horrified. Their view

a form of art performance.)

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Belfast Project: Looking Ahead, 1999 Digital print billboard 10 × 20 feet (305 × 610 cm)

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Village Grave (Republican), 1999 Acrylic on canvas 42 ⅞ × 80 ¾ inches (109 × 205 cm) Private Collection

The greenery is alive and vivid, and the Irish

officer, a man I had worked with over a three-

Tricolour a bold flash, but death stalks this

month period. One gift was Dan Breen’s book

painting. “This is a republican graveyard in

My Fight for Irish Freedom, and the other was

Camlough, South Armagh,” says Maguire.

the photograph of a grave. The grave held two

“I was given a photo of it by the brother of one

hunger strikers and two IRA volunteers, one of

of the boys in the ground.”

whom was the officer’s brother. I understood

The painting dates, explains Maguire, from “a residency with each paramilitary army held in Long Kesh prison, outside Belfast,

the significance—he was telling me why he fought.”

Maguire noticed that “the village looks

in 1999. The Good Friday Agreement was in

as if it is built around the graveyard, which

train, and there were just a small number of

is unusual. Normally, the graveyard is set

prisoners in each block. This painting came

apart, but here it seemed the focal point of

from a set of gifts from the IRA education

the community.”

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THOMAS MCEVILLEY

Brian Maguire at the XXIV São Paulo Bienal

Brian Maguire will show twenty-one charcoal portraits of children living in a favela, or shanty town, in São Paulo (pp. 152–53). The favela is a bit of land that families squatted in near a railroad, with little paths leading in and out of it.

Inside the favela is the Centro Cultural Vila Prudente, a two room building about 500 square feet, where local children come to classes in theatre and art. The Centro Cultural was founded by an Irishman, Pat Clarke, a Holy Ghost father who works with the Movement for the Defence of the Favelas. The Centro has a staff of three, a theatre person, a visual artist, and a psychologist, Antonio de Marcos, Tarcinio Brun and Morilda Munrez. About 45 children, aged 7 to 12, spend part of their days there.

After being invited to represent Ireland at the XXIV São Paulo Bienal, Maguire arranged to spend eight weeks working at the Centro Cultural in February and March of 1998. The Centro turned out to be a place where the high ideals of Latin American socialism had not been forgotten. (One heard of Fanon and Ché in conversation as—quite normally—people would discuss theories of education among the poor.) Maguire got to know each of the children, visited their homes and met some of their parents. He developed a personal affection for the favela. He began to make charcoal portraits of the children in the visual arts classroom. Soon he began combining this with portraits in charcoal, paint, and oil stick, based on newspaper photographs of convicts. These portraits he would work on in his room downtown. As his commitment to both streams of portraiture intensified, it became a private performance which he carried out with virtually religious fervour; he would sometimes work for several days on one of the newspaper-based pictures, remaining very isolated, talking to no-one for as much as two days at a time.

In the portraits of adult criminals Maguire’s goal was to rehumanize and revitalize the individual portrayed (pp. 160– 62). He had spent twelve years teaching art to convicts in Irish prisons, where he built up many close friendships and was consistently impressed by the basic humanity of the men he dealt with and by the mysterious problem that each of them had somehow gotten himself into a trap. The Brazilian

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prisoners whose pictures he saw in the papers were also in the trap, and the economically and culturally deprived children he worked with at the Centro Cultural might be described as on their way to the trap, or in some danger, anyway, of stumbling across it if their lives should veer more toward the streets. The question that hangs over Maguire’s project with the two sets of portraits is: How do the children become the criminals.

When a portrait was finished, the child-subject would take it home and pick out a place to hang it in the family home.

Maguire would visit the home and photograph the portrait in its domestic setting. His exhibition for the 1998 Bienal includes the two sets of portraits and the photographs of the children’s homes with the portraits hanging in them. Maguire borrowed them for the exhibition, and will return them.

They are not for sale.

Another element of the exhibition is a single large acrylic painting based on a 1992 massacre of prisoners in Pavilion 9 of the State Prison, where police gunned many of the prisoners down in their cells (p. 159). The government admitted to 111 massacre victims, though rumours estimate many more.

So in a sense the various elements might be viewed as pictures of different stages of life. First the subjects are seen as children, then as convicts whose pictures are in the news, then as corpses after being massacred by police. On the other hand, Maguire feels that kids undergoing some directional momentum in the Centro Cultural are less likely to end up in prison than if they were simply on the street. Viewing the scenario in this way, the intrusive element of the portraits in the family homes is what makes the difference. The warm and supportive home life that these children experience embraces them as the wall of the home embraces their portrait. Here it is that intervention in the social tragedy of the three different life stages can occur. Finally what unites the various groups represented in the pictures of the three stages of life is that they are all invisible socially in Brazil. It is their invisibility that Maguire intends to rectify in a way, by making them visible in his portraits. “Drawing is an act of love,” he remarks.

Maguire is almost an outsider artist. I am using the term in the looser sense of many recent texts that includes not just

mental patients and / or criminals and / or illiterate descendants of slaves—not even just everyone who hasn’t gone to art school. One could be an outsider artist in this expanded sense and be fully cognisant of art history and the contemporary issues concerning art practice and still (from some inner refusal to allow oneself to be shaped by it) remain outside.

Maguire started painting at age 28 in 1979 as someone with a deep impulse to do so but who was not attuned to art history or the issues of the contemporary scene. What he was attuned to was the fact that his life needed art. He too had, in a way, gotten himself into a trap. His life need for it was one of the factors that made it so autobiographical, and so “almost religious.” For ten years he portrayed subjects from the Troubles, autobiographical scenes based on memories from his years of socialist republican activity. “I didn’t want,” he says, “to be painting anything I had no part in.”

Maguire made autobiographical paintings because he was dealing with his life. He made gestural paintings because he was dealing with his body, with the danger it had gotten him into and the almost religious reliance on art to help it out.

There is a feeling of desperation overlaid on intimacy in his paint handling that verges on the bodily fluids approach that was associated with Action Painters like Jackson Pollock—the whole metaphor that the painter is spurting his life fluids onto the canvas, which would never be held true of Mondrian but was invited by Pollock.

So Maguire by now has almost twenty years of painting under his belt. He’s no longer a novice. He’s felt his way around and may in fact have learned art history inside and out. But still the desperate quality of his feeling, which you can’t quite get away from in the paintings, would keep him from being formed anew by forces outside the realm of feeling, by art historical analyzes, say. Maguire’s paintings have been aggressively passionate or desperate. His bodily fluid-like style involved the desperate sense of an inner self spurting with no hope or more quietly, just bleeding, nose down on the pavement. There is a touch of the mind wandering in darkness. His expressionist brush seems to seek crevasses in the canvas, hollownesses in which to penetrate into distant

Installation view of Casa da Cultura at the XXIV São Paulo Bienal with some of the children from favela Vila Prudente, 1998

depths. The medium of penetration is the slashing, dripping, smeared paint surface, or rather the series of surfaces of multiple depths and directions. The canvas becomes a place of mystery where two unlikely transformations are taking place.

First, the forces in the paint seek to explode the surface with seemingly chaotic energies, streaking lightning-like in various directions that sometimes seem out of synch with one another.

Yet just as desperation catches itself at the last possible

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moment and somehow forces things to hold together a little while longer, no matter how outrageous the stresses pulling them apart, so the complex, multi directional and puzzlingly deep pictorial surface does somehow hold itself together, in a configuration of momentarily stable energies uneasily balanced. Secondly, that complex irrational surface bursting apart with raw feelings, yet held together by a last invocation of some reasonable instinct, becomes three dimensional in a ragged and unclear way, like gazing into a forest and dimly sensing spaces that open far away from one. Maguire murders the surface in order to bring it to life. There is something sacrificial about his paintings, or self-sacrificial. The element of self-sacrifice confirms itself through the analogy of bodily fluids. As the paint gushes or stumbles onto the surface it seems that the artist has pulled it out of himself, or poured it out of himself, that the moment of creating the painting was the moment of his self-sacrifice or suicide. The human figures in the painting are often either wan ghostly forms that seem to have had the living fluids drained from them or to be constrained by some confinement that has robbed them of all expressiveness. They seem to be gazing mutely out of some confinement that is too overpowering even to struggle against anymore. The canvas itself has become complicit; it is their person, their confinement, the dark forest from which they gaze at a world of unattainable freedom. Their humanity has been taken from them.

The works on paper in Maguire’s São Paulo project seem far more austere and controlled than his paintings, less indulgent to the expressionist impulse; there is a sense of power holding itself in check out of a desire not to overly interfere; something is implied like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, that if you express too much on a topic you have probably obscured it, covered it over, deflected it from its selfhood.

Maguire’s splish-splash approach to painterly handling showered feeling onto the canvas with a dense inner charge.

But in crossing the barrier between the self and the other, his style underwent a purgation. Neither the children nor the adult convicts seem to have had the humanity taken from

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Raul Araujo, founding member of Mudança de Cena, who helped significantly in the Casa da Cultura project, and in gaining Maguire access to Pavilion 9 in Carandiru prison in São Paulo, 1998

them yet. Nor is there an excess of expressiveness—no sinister splashing fluids, no dark confinement. Only around the eyes especially, but not only of the children, there is sometimes a tragic tenderness. They are not in the trap yet, but perhaps they are being set up for it. The full expressive apparatus of the paintings does not apply to them yet, because it is the trap, and they are not yet entrapped in it. Their treatment is more neutral, more laid back, more calmly inexpressive, except around the eyes, that softness, that sweetness, that vulnerability.

The media Maguire uses in the Centro Cultural project, especially charcoal and oil stick, are more austere and contained than big slopping puddles of paint. The austerity of the format would seem to result from the fact that here he wasn’t just dealing with his own feelings, but with other lives that he didn’t have much say about except wishful

thinking; maybe the austerity is a way to hold back from wishful thinking.

The question was how and how far to let his feelings enter in. As he sat at the table at the Centro Cultural, drawing as an act of love, while the child who one hopes doesn’t fall into a trap sat before him, his whole home hanging around him like an implication in the air, Maguire found a characteristically Post-Modern way to strategize the project.

This was to make it all one not metaphysically but by some kind of gently imposed structure of perception. So it wouldn’t be just a bunch of separate drawings to be hung on a wall in São Paulo, but something compromising the boundaries between media to try to melt things into at least a momentary situational point of view unit. So the picture of the child on the wall is like something extruded from the wall, an expression of the home itself that has produced this external sign of its inherent tragedy and desperation and tenderness.

The “art life project” is the attempt made by many artists since about 1960 to integrate art more fully into life or vice versa, to overcome the breach between art and life that has been nurtured for so long by the aesthetic and spiritual view of art, the view that it dealt with otherworldly ideals rather than with the plain stuff of everyday life. For generations many artists have been concerned to propose and demonstrate solutions to this project. Stratagems have ranged from Marcel Duchamp’s introduction of ordinary household objects into art exhibitions to Robert Rauschenberg’s statement that he wanted to work in the gap between art and life (which John Cage corrected, saying that was still too much separation) to Joseph Beuys’s “Social sculpture.”

In terms of the breach between art and life, painting seemed the worst offender. It was the medium that was historically most complicit with illusion and deception.

Painting became the enemy to early proponents of Conceptual Art, Performance Art and other formalizations of the art life project. Through the 1970s painting occupied an outcast role and was forced into a kind of exile no longer commonly seen except in notably conservative, or “Modernist,” galleries and museums. Around 1980, when painting came out of its exile,

it appeared to have incorporated elements of Conceptual and Performance Arts. It reappeared not as traditional aesthetic painting but as conceptual painting, usually heavily ironic involving criticism of the traditional aesthetic equipment of painting.

One of the signs of Maguire’s partial status as an outsider artist is that his work has not obediently followed the dominant changes in art theory and practice. His style never became conceptual painting or anti-painting. It maintained the aesthetic surface of the expressionist tradition with full seriousness, because of the metaphor of the mingling streams of bodily fluids. What he strategized out of his desperation and the tenderness of drawing was a way to act out the “art life project” without completely renouncing the transformative aspect of the painterly surface; his solution implies that the gesture of painting by itself is not enough anymore; he made up its deficiency by interlocking the work into life in a performative way, rather than letting the painting stand on its own.

Maguire’s Bienal project is an approach to the problem of how to attain art that lives on the intimacy of life itself while not abandoning the painterly commitment to the aesthetic surface which can seem other to life in its transcendent and aesthetic ambitions. Maguire’s solution was twofold. First, he does in fact compromise the aesthetic surface somewhat, or relinquish an excessive (expressive) degree of control over it as in the greater austerity of the charcoal portraits than of the autobiographical paintings. Secondly, Maguire’s performative tendency ties his Bienal project intimately into his life by way of the lives of others he associates with, while it remains nonetheless founded to an appreciable degree, on the painterly surface. The complex structure grows directly out of his life as a kind of living performance. His months of working in São Paulo really should be regarded as performative parts of the artwork, rather than as something separate like a setting, that the artwork derived from. The sets of portraits are artifacts left behind by the performance, as Beuys’s performances left sculptures behind him.

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Pamala and Tabata with their portraits, favela Vila Prudente, 1998

A rare ray of thematic sunshine illuminates

something we did in the yard at the back

these poignant works (pp. 150–55). The

of a house in the favela in São Paulo,” says

infectiously lovely smiles of these children

Maguire. “What we did is straighten the

gives us a glimpse of what it is like to be Brian

nails and hang the mounted drawings of the

Maguire (and them!) on a good day. Without

children to the wall.” Of the photograph of the

their setting, the portraits are what they are:

two little girls holding their portraits, Maguire

drawings of children in the poorest favelas of

says: “This picture has everything that this

Brazil. Set in context, we see also what the

project contained.”

pictures do. But for all the effervescence of their expressions and joy at being depicted, the surroundings are clearly harsh. “It was

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Favela Vila Prudente: Pamala and Tabata Viana da Silva, 1998 Cibachrome on aluminum 29 ½ × 44 inches (75 × 112 cm)

Favela Vila Prudente: Fernandes Pereira da Silva, 1998 Cibachrome on aluminum 29 ½ × 44 inches (75 × 112 cm) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Heritage Gift by Owen O’Brien, 2000

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Casa da Cultura: Patricia Castro da Silva, 2016 Lithograph, edition of 5 15 × 11 inches (38 × 28 cm) Collection Museu de Arte do Rio

Casa da Cultura in Maguire’s studio, Dublin, 1998 Charcoal and conté on paper mounted on canvas Each: 11 × 8 inches (28 × 20.3 cm) Private Collections, São Paulo

153

Casa da Cultura: Patricia Castro da Silva, 1998 Charcoal and conté on paper mounted on canvas 11 × 8 inches (28 × 20.3 cm) Private Collection, São Paulo

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Casa da Cultura: Clebson Barros da Silva, 1998 Charcoal and conté on paper mounted on canvas 11 × 8 inches (28 × 20.3 cm) Private Collection, São Paulo

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Memorial, 1998 Mixed media on linen (diptych) 105 ⅞ × 166 ⅞ inches (269 × 424 cm) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Heritage Gift by Owen O’Brien, 2000

This portrayal of the aftermath of massacre

Maguire continues, “The image is based

in Carandiru prison has a brutal simplicity to

on a journalist’s photographs of the autopsies.

it at first glance. A row of arranged corpses,

They were branded, like we associate with

and two others—seemingly disappearing

pigs. The painting was an attempt to reverse

from the frame, to suggest hundreds more

this marking and show the dead with a kind of

beyond the scene we behold. Maguire’s

monumental dignity. There is a river carrying

notes on the armed intervention in Carandiru

the bodies away, the ancient idea that death

prison correspond with passages in a book I

was the entry to something else—a better

gave him after meeting its author: Lockdown,

place? Or just the crematorium. I did it back

by Drauzio Varella, who worked as a doctor

in Dublin; I was able to do one figure a day,

administering to HIV-positive patients in

no more.”

the jail. “They dovetail almost exactly,” says Maguire; both independently came to the same narrative.

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Diário Popular (Twelve Days in March), 1998 Mixed media on paper Each: 19 ¾ × 27 ½ inches (50 × 70 cm) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Heritage Gift by Owen O’Brien, 2000

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Installation view of Diário Popular (Twelve Days in March) (1998) in Changing States at BOZAR, Brussels, February 28–May 19, 2013

There is, as always, a story behind Maguire’s

dinner where he had me questioned within

installations—this one a “washing line” of

his hearing to determine whether I was worth

images from the São Paulo daily newspaper

meeting. I am proud to say I failed the test.

Diário Popular, shown in BOZAR, Brussels.

Unbeknownst to him, I was using the police

“I did a number of drawings,” says Maguire,

pages in a daily private ritual where I would

“one a day, during March 1998, from the

take an image and reproduce it as a thing of

police pages of Diário Popular. The owner

beauty (or at least try). This would be done

of this newspaper had me brought, without

in silence each morning, and felt a bit like a

my knowledge that he would be there, to a

religious performance.”

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Male Figure, 1997 Acrylic on canvas 81 ½ × 42 ⅛ inches (207 × 107 cm) Ann and Marc McKeogh-Thiollet, France

A sickness of pale yellow wraps the apparent mental sickness of the figure, hunched over his own erection, with a wince of pleasure.

We sense his intimate satisfaction, but view it from the unusual place of observing the usually private masturbator as voyeur. It feels squalid, but hypocritically so—for as every man knows, this is a picture of everyman.

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Irish Political History, 1997 Acrylic on canvas 70 ⅞ × 55 ⅞ inches (180 × 142 cm) Wolverhampton Art Gallery

“Bodies, coming out of the mist, to accuse the present.” The painting is intended as a “subversion of self-righteous justification.

A refusal to recognize that the ones killed by one side are justifiable, while the others are not.”

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The Bombers’ Aesthetic, 1996 Acrylic on paper 43 ¼ × 29 ½ inches (110 × 75 cm)

These paintings, says Maguire, “all refer to

It came to nothing: the British rounded up

a particular time in 1996.” In this purgatory,

the operatives, and the IRA undertook to

“there’s a sudden explosion at Canary

wage peace.”

Wharf. So what is going on? Part of the IRA

The painting is an effort to view the

was putting pressure on [Sinn Féin leader]

explosion through the eyes of the bomber.

Gerry Adams to let them have one last

Maguire felt this point should be made,

attempt to bring England to its knees and

because to get to peace you have to stand,

win the armed struggle. So we had Canary

however briefly, in your opponent’s shoes.

Wharf, with the killing of the two newspaper salesmen, and then the attack on Heathrow.

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The Home Officer, 1996 Acrylic on paper 43 ¼ × 29 ½ inches (110 × 75 cm) Private Collection

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Irish Landscape, 1996 Acrylic on paper 43 ¾ × 30 ¾ inches (111 × 78 cm) Owen O’Brien, Cork

There are always two sides to the story of Irish

of John Major’s premiership. My work was a

land and landscape: its wild and inimitable

sign that while a cease-fire was in place, the

beauty, and the history of war and famine that

violence was under our feet. This was part

Irish earth knows. Here, Maguire presents

of a show looking at the war, which we all

the dichotomy at a particular time: “The rifle

hoped was over. A few days before the show

buried below an idyllic landscape seemed to

opened, the war returned with the bombing

explain the politics of the inertia at the time

of Canary Wharf.”

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From Nuremberg to Montana, 1996 Mixed media on canvas 70 ½ × 55 ⅛ inches (179 × 140 cm) Private Collection

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Man of War (Balkans), ca. 1995 Acrylic on paper 43 ¼ × 29 ½ inches (110 × 75 cm) Private Collection

Rape as a weapon of war is as old as war

The painting arose from these events,

itself. But the extent of the capture and

but is also a deeper tribute to the Irish writer

detention of mainly Muslim women and girls

and activist Hubert Marshal Butler, who urged

for mass systematic violation by Bosnian Serb

action on behalf of German and Austrian

armies and militias during the genocide of

Jews during the Holocaust. Maguire claims

the early 1990s was horrific even by history’s

Butler’s “reports from those countries were

appalling standards. Tens of thousands of

like modern war reports from the Serbian

girls and women were brutally raped at

persecutions,” among which Maguire kindly

centers established for the purpose, markedly

included my own.

at Višegrad, Foča, Rogatica, and Vogošća, outside Sarajevo. The mass violation formed a major part of my own reporting from that war.

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Guns, 1995 Mixed media on paper 59 ⅞ × 30 inches (152 × 76 cm) Marilyn Oshman, Houston

A pale background emphasizes the metallic,

go into the woods and shoot guns. They love

glaucous ugliness of the killing machines,

their guns. The shop also had, incidentally,

while the price tag that each different weapon

a collection of Belleek pottery.” Earlier in

has in common banalizes their menace: yours

the 1990s, Maguire and the late Texan artist

to buy today! “This is a pawn shop—not a gun

Lucas Johnson attended flea markets selling

shop—in Idaho,” says Maguire. “Some of the

machine guns. It’s possible to purchase these

guns were handmade. There’s an automatic

without any checks, thus making it easy

there that you can use with only one hand. It’s

to amass an arsenal, as many of the mass

a funny business: when you go to America, you

shooters have done.

meet genuine people whose idea of fun is to

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D Block Party, 1994 Acrylic on canvas 86 × 110 inches (218.4 × 279.4 cm) Private Collection, New York

Maguire explains: “In the 1980s and 1990s,

services in D Block. There was significant drug

the E Block of the maximum security prison

use at night in this block. The painting is my

in Portlaoise, Ireland, held many members of

imaginative projection of the hallucinations

the IRA who, as political prisoners (or, as they

that might be provided by such drug use.

described themselves, POWs), by agreement

The dreary, paint-peeling cell changed to the

did no prison work. The work—sweeping

multicolored extravaganza of the painting.”

landings, cleaning, and such—was performed by ordinary prisoners, who received 50 percent remission of their sentences in return for the awful conditions and low level of educational

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Drancy, 1994 Acrylic on paper 43 ¼ × 29 ½ inches (110 × 75 cm) Sam Gallagher, Ireland

Maguire says, “This railway station of Drancy

Ljubljana in 1994. A year later, just after the

was at a junction for the transport of the Jews

Balkan wars ended, I traveled to Sarajevo.

of France during the Nazi occupation. The

Butler was in Yugoslavia too. He reported

painting is a tribute to Hubert Butler, who filed

the sectarian killings during World War II—in

his reports to the Irish Times from occupied

those days, Serbs and Jews were the victims,

Europe. He used Irish neutrality to expose

Croats the perpetrators, and Muslims the

what was happening to the Jews, and the

gofers—but the killing was the same as next

culpability not only of the Nazis but also the

time around, namely, of neighbors, inspired

railwaymen who pulled the switches. I made

by sectarian hatred.”

this in Milan on a journey through Europe to

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Portraits from a Day Room, 1994 Light box Each: 48 × 48 × 6 ¼ inches (122 × 122 × 16 cm) Gransha Hospital, Derry

There is both disturbance and compassion

photos of patients with their portraits made in

in these two portraits, set in the Day Room

the garden for display in the hospital entrance.

at Gransha Hospital in Derry, where, says

I had the pleasure of removing [a portrait

Maguire, “I set up an easel, painted the nurse,

bust of] Lord Gransha and depositing him in a

and waited for customers to come forward—

broom cupboard for a period of detention of

and they did. I painted around a dozen

about six months. This subversion came back

patients. It was the time of Margaret Thatcher,

to bite me, as the light boxes were removed

and patients were sent from the hospital

after six months and put in a coal cellar.

into accommodation in the ‘community.’ Two

“One incident stayed with me: Two

such persons, one called Anne, were getting

senior hospital psychiatrists came through

organized to move to apartments in the Derry

the entrance on their way home. Glancing

city center. When we went there to install

without stopping at the work, they exclaimed:

the paintings and photograph in the room,

‘Who’s paying for this?’ In direct contrast,

both patients proudly stepped into the shot.

a young woman cleaner who I had asked to

While this conflicted with the protocol, that

clean the glass on the light boxes spent time

they were permitted nothing, no decisions,

contemplating the work and after a short

the family with the doctors decided, but in the

silence proclaimed yes, she got it, and they are

moment, I was not willing to deny them their

good. I deduced that art appreciation in Derry

wish to be photographed with their painting.

is in inverse proportion to income.”

Later, I made a light box of these two, and two

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Portraits from a Day Room, 1994 Acrylic on canvas board Each: 30 × 21 inches (76 × 53 cm) Private Collection, Derry

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Dominic McGlinchey, 1993 Acrylic on paper on board and steel 27 × 15 ½ inches (68.6 × 39.4 cm) Michael and Orlaith Traynor, Bray, Ireland

The face of the former chief of staff of the

was gunned down while making a call from a

Irish National Liberation Army, Dominic

telephone box in 1994—a scene fictionalized

McGlinchey, contains a curious convergence

in a short story by Edna O’Brien.

of normality and impact. With its narrow

Maguire met him in Portlaoise Prison:

sandstone palette, and simple sackcloth

“I heard stories in Belfast about Dominic that

garment, the portrait was painted when

made my hair stand on end.” But the painter

McGlinchey was a prisoner in Portlaoise

found “a man most considerate when it came

Prison. McGlinchey was a feared and

to the people around him on the INLA landing,

reportedly ruthless republican leader, who

E3. He used to model for the painting classes

admitted in a newspaper interview to ordering

in Portlaoise. He knew my background: I was

the Droppin Well disco bombing in 1982, which

with the Officials, he was INLA—a bitter

killed eleven off-duty British soldiers and

schism and split. During his period on the

six civilians. His wife Mary was murdered by

landing, there was no violence. We talked.”

gunmen from his own army, and he himself

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Peggy Death Bed, 1992 / 93 Acrylic on paper on board 22 × 30 inches (56 × 76 cm) Christy and Valerie Moore, Dublin

This deeply intimate portrayal depicts the

over her for five hours in the morgue until

woman young Maguire came to know as

her family’s local undertaker’s car arrived to

“Nanny Peggy,” “a part-time surrogate

bring her body home.” It was a silent, dignified

mother. The woman who minded me at

good-bye. An early influence, Edvard Munch,

weekends when I was very young and my

casts a shadow on this work.

mum was ill. The image is from her deathbed.

My father, myself, and my son kept guard

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Self-Portrait, 1993 Acrylic on paper 29 ½ × 21 ⅝ inches (75 × 55 cm) Owen O’Brien, Cork

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Black, Blue, and White, 1992 Acrylic on paper 30 × 22 inches (76 × 56 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

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Abortion Ireland, 1992 Acrylic on canvas 53 ⅛ × 46 inches (135 × 117 cm) Factor Family, Los Angeles

A painting based upon “a real case, of an

but the response of the police was to stop her

underage girl made pregnant by a neighboring

traveling to England to prevent the abortion.

adult. Her family organized for her to travel

It became known as the X Case. So it’s a

to England to have an abortion, but she

picture about the Irish state’s attitude to

was blocked by the police. The father told

women, children, rape, and abortion in the

the police that they would find forensic

early 1990s.”

evidence, which can prove who raped her,

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Figure Silenced, 1991 Acrylic on canvas 68 ½ × 50 ⅜ inches (174 × 128 cm) Crawford Art Gallery, Cork

An acutely disturbing work: this frail, pale

images and experiences. It references a young

figure silenced by duct tape—painted during

man I met in the school who was angry and

a residency Maguire was commissioned to

frustrated—as young men often are—but

take at a school for severely disabled young

neither emotion was engaged with. This is

people during the European Union Year of

what gave rise to the cloth across the figure’s

the Disabled. It is a work of “fiction,” says

mouth. He is forcibly silenced by our refusal

Maguire, but based on “a few different

to listen.”

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Secular, 1990 Acrylic on canvas 59 ⅞ × 46 inches (152 × 117 cm)

Struck by its blood-red vividness, we see and know two things at once about this organism: a heart and a vagina. But really, which one?

Both, says Maguire. “Among other things, this is a vagina. But it is also the Sacred Heart, both bits of a person, mixed up, in—I hope— a profane image. Our dual concept of love.”

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The Foundation Stones (Mental Home), 1990 Acrylic on canvas 81 ⅛ × 68 ⅛ inches (206 × 173 cm) Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

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The Big House, 1990 Acrylic on canvas 81 ⅛ × 65 ⅜ inches (206 × 166 cm) Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane

This climbing circular structure takes the eye

across the wire so that he seemed suspended

with it as it turns—and as with the similar

in space a hundred feet above the ground

effect achieved by Bruegel in his Tower of

floor. Simultaneously, a female officer paraded

Babel (1563), all is not well. Maguire’s painting

twenty prisoners at ground level. Noisy,

is “directly based on ‘the circle’ at Mountjoy

dark—with tremendous light at the top: this

prison in Dublin.” And its Bruegel-esque effect

was and is the overcrowded solution to the

is “made by using the image at each level you

class-divided city.”

see when climbing the circular steel stairs.

At the top landing, a man would often climb

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Jail Suicide, 1989 Acrylic on canvas 66 ⅛ × 40 ⅛ inches (168 × 102 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

The blank face of a young, lifeless prisoner

this: the man grinning was a lifer, but the

hanging from the bars of his cell contrasts

victim was doing six months. I understood

with the dominant image of a mask-like,

this to be a story of a young man who still

dehumanized grimace of the other inmate,

knew what it was like to be free, and was so

and his satanic gesture of play with the corpse

traumatized by the experience of prison, he

of his cellmate. This work was based upon

hung himself, while the long-term prisoner

a “stick drawing by a prisoner,” from which

was so institutionalized by the prison system,

Maguire made his painting. The suicide by

he laughed—or pretended to laugh.”

hanging took place in Mountjoy Prison. “It

Maguire adds, “When I showed this

was common knowledge what happened.

painting in the Kerlin Gallery in 1990, a young

When the prison officer opened the door, the

girl, from an estate across the main road from

man on the bed, the cellmate, was pretending

where we lived, hung herself in prison—the

to pull the legs of the suicide victim who

first female prisoner to die like this.”

was hanging from the bars. The thing is

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Seattle News Reader, 1989 Acrylic on canvas 61 ⅞ × 64 ⅛ inches (157 × 163 cm)

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Richard, 1987 Acrylic on canvas 60 × 46 inches (152.5 × 117 cm) Michael and Orlaith Traynor, Bray, Ireland

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Children and Self (Remembering), 1986 Acrylic on canvas 72 × 68 ½ inches (183 × 174 cm) The Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin

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Divis Flats, 1986 Acrylic on canvas 71 × 49 inches (180.5 × 124.5 cm) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Donation, Vincent & Noeleen Ferguson, 1996

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Child with 6 Grains of Rice in Uganda, 1984 Acrylic on canvas 74 × 50 inches (188 × 127 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

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DONALD KUSPIT

Brian Maguire

Over and over in Brian Maguire’s pictures one sees paint flooding the scenes, paint splashed or dripped or, more usually, heavily applied to the canvas, paint that seems out of control and beside the point of control, paint run amuck until it deforms the scene, making it crude and violent and even ugly, at least by the standards of ordinary pictorial propriety.

“Pretty as a picture” won’t work for a Maguire image, which isn’t a picture in the ordinary media sense that has generally come to determine what we mean by “picture,” and which has nothing of the innocuousness—the bland harmony— that we come to associate with prettiness. A Maguire picture is produced not reproduced—roughly hewn hand-made rather than smoothly manufactured, indeed, made with a hand so vehemently assertive as to seem unsusceptible to mechanical control, unsubservient to any system of control.

The sense of abandonment to paint, or of wilder painterliness, and of an imagery more fantastic than descriptive—freely transformative of a subject matter rather than transcriptive of its common appearance—and of a certain sense of confrontal alienation: all these are the signs of Expressionism, or rather, in the 80s, of Neo-Expressionism. That a strong Expressionism, such as Maguire’s, is still viable, indicates that the storm-and-stress mentality inseparable from it—an art expressive of rage and determined to outrage—still makes socio-emotional sense at this time in Western history. This century’s art began with a tumultuous Expressionism, and seems to be ending with one, as though to signal that the century’s inhumane reality can arouse apocalyptic emotions.

Expressionism has been understood in a variety of ways.

Or rather it remains the most defiantly misunderstood style of the 20th century. Ideologically, its revolutionariness has been claimed by both the Left and the Right. Or rather, the side which didn’t want it gave it to—blamed it on—the other.

Others have argued that its failing is that it is completely apolitical. It has been deplored as specious in its pursuit of spontaneity, as manufacturing a spontaneity which does not and cannot realistically exist. It apparently aims to cut through the Gordian knot of complexity of consciousness with a swift sword of emotional directness. It has been

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regarded as anti-intellectual; it seems able to walk through the minefield of intellectual mediations unharmed, more out of innocence than calculation. Yet for others there is a a special wisdom in its impatient pursuit of sensual immediacy—its polymorphous perversity of touch. It is the wisdom of being personally irrepressible in a world of sociopolitical repression. It pursues emancipation by expression—seemingly unmanipulated, unregulated articulation—in a society which attempts to administer all articulation, journalistically level it supposedly for the sake of communicative competence, facile accessibility which ignores both the inherent precariousness— ambiguity and ambivalence—of all significant articulation and the uncertainty and unpredictability with which it will be received, whether on an individual or mass level.

Expressionism defies the media attempt to standardize communication, which is manipulative and authoritarian to the extent that it claims to offer the definitive mode of articulation, a uniform mode that claims to be a universal model. In a sense, Expressionism is about the crisis in communication in a society which insists that there is only one reliable mode of statement. In denial, and reflective of the unconscious recognition that there is no “transcendent,” respectable mode of public communication, Expressionism offers “personal” assertion, not easily categorizable however decipherable many of its features. It offers, in Sartrean terms, an untotalizable situation of stress—a stress that is the core of the personal and as such not entirely communicable in conventional terms. In the very act of using them, stress sweeps them away. In a sense, what is left, the trace of this process, is the “personal expression.”

Going further, Expressionism insists on the priority of subjective “truth” over objective truth, of profoundly felt emotion over scientifically considered fact. Expressionism argues existential urgency where media neutrality is the norm, intensity rather than civility, irrational and immoderate outcry in defiance of what is regarded as the moderate voice of reason (even though it may really be the quietistic voice of compromised politesse). It claims to be in the service of life and against all the forces that deaden it, that seem to

make us immune to it. Expressionism is an art of feeling that flies in the face of false reason; it is the protest of private feeling against traumatic public fact, a protest that is an awakening to the larger truth of life. One might say, in Erich Fromm’s distinction, that it is desperately biophiliac in the face of society’s necrophilia. It has been said that Expressionism is more an outlook than a style, yet certain characteristic features, generally centering around organically raw primitivism of handling and composition, have been associated with it. It is, thus, doubly traumatic—“anarchistic,” as the Nazis said in describing it as “degenerate”—in form and content. Misconceived yet overdetermined, Expressionism has been the most belabored and berated style of the century.

I want to argue that the best understanding of Expressionism is psychoanalytic. This is not to deny the validity of other interpretations of it, only to argue that they are best reconciled through the psychoanalytic framework.

Richard Kuhns argues, in his book on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Art, that the heart of such theory is the conception of art as a special form of dream, with ostensibly invented manifest content but involuntarily given latent content. The dream is a specialized form of “expression”: “Expression is established when the manifest sense provides the initial given from which the observer can go to a remote latent content. The latent, upon interpretation, will be a kind of thought.” I want to suggest that Expressionism is unique, as an art, in that it attempts to abolish the distinction between manifest and latent content—to blur them so that they seem to merge in a single “visionary” image. A good Expressionist picture creates the effect of a waking dream, or of the dreamlike character of true wakefulness—which is exactly the effect Maguire strives for.

Surrealism, which is explicitly psychoanalytically oriented, maintains the distinction, however strange the content of its manifest representations. These must be interpreted, along dogmatically given Freudian guidelines, to find the latent content. In Expressionism, the unconscious meaning is emphatically evident in the picture, through the painterliness.

The Expressionist picture uses a familiar, everyday subject

matter but renders it in an agitated, uncommonsensical, often fantastic—at times, apparently nonsensically so—manner.

Real appearances become bizarre, irreal, because they are beside themselves with vital meaning—charged with that surplus of painterly energy that formalist critics think destroys pictorial coherence, but in fact supplies the only meaningful vitality in the picture. Indeed, the scene’s meaning seems displaced into or almost entirely a function of that energy, and the differentiated way it surrounds and renders the scene’s elements. Painterly flexibility makes them emotional substance. Indeed, one of the major features of Maguire’s Expressionism—the true sign of a serious Expressionist—is the virtuoso flexibility of his painterly touch. He orchestrates his libidinous painterliness so that it seems not only emotionally exciting in and for itself, but unpredictable in its undermining effect on our habits of objective seeing. The effect of unpredictability, of a certain kind of arbitrariness, is crucial for Expressionism—a sign of genuine Expressionism, and harder to achieve than is usually thought—since on it rides the shock of emotional recognition which Expressionism is finally about. In general, the Expressionist picture is a vector of painterly forces in unresolvable tension, which is what makes it an “expression,” that is, the dreamlike manifestation of a hidden emotional meaning.

What is the emotional content of Maguire’s Expressionism?

Thematically, two kinds of scenes dominate his imagery: public violence and domestic unhappiness. They are not unrelated, and converge; each in a peculiar way becomes responsible for, even identified with, the other. Public reality invades domestic life, as it were, insidiously “in-forms” it with violence, potential or actual. Certain superficially simple, yet capsulating, works make the point with a kind of grim brevity. In Portrait (1984; p. 220) and TV and Child (1986) a clumsily innocent figure is located in or attached to the world of public, sociopolitical violence. In the former work this is accomplished directly, in the latter indirectly. In Portrait it is the big gun’s power–“pull”–that misshapes the figure. Its head is small compared to the gun, its body lumpish compared to the clearly outlined gun. Indeed, everything about the

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figure is indefinite and soft and banally gross except its “hard” gun.

Without the gun, the figure would be a cipher, even with its beret and sunglasses, which make merely bohemian sense without the gun. The gun is its whole identity; the figure would be nondescript without it. Perhaps I’m dwelling on this figure too much, but it clearly makes the point that is more obscurely made in the more inherently dramatic figures: they too would be ciphers without the violence they directly embody, the violence symbolized by the gun. Without that indwelling violence—that identification with violence— they would be nonentities.

Similarly, in TV and Child the child is absorbed by the TV set’s murky screen. It seems to mimic the way we spontaneously produce images from the unconscious; the TV screen is fascinating, exercising an irresistible attraction.

It is worth noting that in Maguire’s picture it has a stronger identity than the child watching it, who has become an improvised blur—suggesting how completely he is merged into it. The TV set dominates and has in effect taken over the intimacy of the scene. It represents the power of the external world over the internal world. It is a powerful political weapon—the ultimate Orwellian weapon—just because it can reach directly into the home. It establishes a condition of passive expectation; the viewer is fed by the world without making any effort. What he sees on the TV screen is entirely sociopolitical. The TV pacified child—the child pacified by publicly created images—is likely to grow up into the irregular “soldier” (of fortune?) the Portrait depicts, killing for a cause he comprehends in only the most primitive conceptual terms, that is, the terms of the TV image. In a sense, Maguire’s own primitive material handling is meant to challenge and counteract the TV image, that is, to constitute an image that will not pacify—that will arouse rather than be passively consumed. Such arousal generates a sense of individual identity; one snaps out of the condition of impassive mass audience. Maguire’s Expressionism is materially as well as conceptually political, as in all serious Expressionism.

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Maguire’s Homage to Orwell 84 (1985) makes his point more completely and personally than Portrait and TV and Child. The private and the public converge in the tortured body—the victimized and self-victimizing body. In this work, perhaps the key element in Maguire’s Expressionism—his concern with bodiliness, and the reliance of the sense of self on the sense of body—is most articulate. Over and over again in Maguire’s pictures we see bodies that seem trapped in some involuntary agony—bodies that seem pure emotion. Generally they are uncontrollably anxious, even when erotically vivid.

The body seems constituted by uncontrollable paint—by a gesture at once anxiously erotic and eroticized by anxiety.

The serious Expressionist painting establishes the simultaneity of the bodiliness of paint and the expressivity of the body. It is preoccupied with the body because psychoanalytically speaking, latent content is most manifest in the body. The body is the most dreamlike of realities, as it were, for it is inherently expressive. It is thus the target of sociopolitical repression. Maguire shows us the body as the scene of a struggle between natural expressivity and selfcensorship. That is, it is a battlefield between superego and impulse—a place of violent emotion and angry intimacy.

Maguire handles the body’s physicality with a strange manic curiosity, and impassioned handling of each detail of flesh that can be understood in terms developed by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein: the body is presented in an aggressive paranoid fantasy in which it is destroyed, in unconscious hope of its redemption through love. But love— and many of Maguire’s works are implicitly about love, as a far from tranquil scene of domesticity—is at best the parody of paradise, as in Lovers to Be (1982). The important, nonKleinean—political—point, however, is that the violated body Maguire depicts is not the articulation of some regressive infantile fantasy, but rather indicative of its internalization of repressive social forces, more particularly, the force of Catholicism, as implied by Child before Catholic Statue (1983; p. 223). Is the child to become the twisted, morbid body on the cross, with its unhealthy sexuality? All the strangeness of adulthood is epitomized by that crucified body. The contrast

between child and crucified Christ—not yet clearly the redeemed body of Christ—epitomizes the tension between the biophiliac and the necrophiliac—the vitalizing and the devitalizing—that pervades Maguire’s paintings, almost in an Expressionist allegory or psychomachia.

This work makes clear that Maguire is not dealing with the ordinary “civilizing” of the body but with a social structure determined to alienate us from our bodies the better to control our minds. He is dealing with that special pathos that results when we are made to feel our bodies are inherently unhealthy, and “unhealable,” making us lepers to ourselves. In work after work, we see figures that can best be described as mangled—murdered—by their own pathos, as in The World Is Full of Murder (1985). Maguire almost always shows the body in a strange state of decay, due to the pathos of its feelings.

Perhaps this is clearest in his explicitly personal familial works, such as Children and Self (Remembering) (1986; p. 209) and Family Relationship (1985). The remembering body has the color of life but the passivity of death and the look of unrelievable suffering. The same ambiguous death-in-life, lifein-death look—the same effect of being trapped in suffering— occurs early, in Self Alone (1982). The figure is presumably masturbating—asserting its basic vitality through the most primitive form of sexuality—on the edge of a bed whose blackness suggests death, turns the bed into a spiritual coffin.

Alone and Still Mother (1982) makes the same ambiguous point: a seemingly dead nurturent figure, laid out as if a final viewing, next to the baby carriage, a symbol of life.

Similarly, the various self-portraits Maguire has executed over the years tend to look as much like death masks as lively self-expressions. An early one, from 1980, reminds me of the deceptively lifelike, slightly waxen, painted portrait of the deceased used on the Egyptian Coptic coffin covers. Maguire is clearly into the dark side of self, as much as he tries to look at the bright side of sex; and that doesn’t remain very bright for very long. The distance between Sex in the Brain (1984) and Couple (1983)—between joyously imagined sex and the grim reality of the marital relationship—is not very great. It is really the distance between a celebration of the life force in

fantasy and a realistic recognition of the pressures of the death instinct. These tend to take social form, surface in the sense of living in an oppressive society, as JB in Dublin (1982) suggests.

There is, then, a doubling of effect in Maguire: an allegorical struggle between life and death forces is overlaid with the struggle for individual self-expression in a repressive society. The result is a picture which, to my experience, is deeply depressive—in which aggression takes depressing form. As in serious Expressionist imagery, one never knows, in Maguire’s paintings, what is unequivocally erotic, what unequivocally aggressive; the two merge inseparably, which is part of the depressive character of his pictures.

The most prominent Expressionism today, as in the past, is German Expressionism. Much as contemporary German Expressionism can be conceived as a protest and rebellion against the horrific reality of not too distant German history, so Maguire’s Expressionism can be conceived as a protest and rebellion against contemporary Irish reality.

In Maguire’s works it seems an almost uniformly dismal reality, relieved only by ambivalent moments of sexual pleasure—involuted erotic stimulation (including that of painting expressionistically), almost as though erotic activity was a form of introspection, that is, of introspective escape from external reality to psychological reality. The message of Maguire’s Expressionism seems to be that to be authentically—existentially—individual in Ireland today one must rebel against it in spirit the way it once politically rebelled against England. This suggests that the spiritual revolt which Maguire’s paintings represent is a disguised—muted?— political rebellion. It takes the form such rebellion almost always takes initially: revelation of the despair of everyday life, emotional exposure of the misery of the status quo. Maguire’s angry Expressionist paintings give the lie to the happiness of Irish life, betray the fabled Irish romanticism. In this, they are violently adversarial.

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Roadside Assassination, 1983 / 84 Acrylic on canvas 68 ⅛ × 74 ⅝ inches (173 × 189.5 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

A face lit by blood and fear, in a menacing

The soldier was taken to his death in terror,

setting, dominates this haunting depiction

and the volunteer left the scene in terror too.

of the murder of a British paratrooper by the

It was like the bullet also went back into the

Official IRA, painted during the early 1980s.

man who pulled the trigger,” as expressed by

Maguire revisited killings of the early 1970s,

the dramatic focus on the latter’s appalled

and this painting “is part of my examination

visage. “It’s a picture of the horror of the man

of events at that time, and explores atrocities

killed and the killer.” What did he conclude

committed by one side, rather than the

from these reflections? “What did it all come

other—questioning one side’s atrocities.

to? To a fundamental pacifism.”

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Portrait, 1984 Acrylic on canvas 59 ½ × 31 ½ inches (151 × 80 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

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Mountain Funeral, 1983 Acrylic on canvas 56 ½ × 69 ¼ inches (143.5 × 176 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

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Child before Catholic Statue, 1983 Acrylic on canvas 86 ⅝ × 60 ¼ inches (220 × 153 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

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Liffey Suicides, ca. 1983 Acrylic on canvas 60 × 40 inches (152.5 × 101.5 cm) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Donation, Vincent & Noeleen Ferguson, 1996

The swirl of the Liffey’s waters seems to

the reason you have a city is its river: Dublin,

engulf the bridge astride them, as though

London. But in Dublin, that has been reversed:

a last view from the current as it pulls us

the river is now a disposal of life, disposing its

downward—which is exactly the purpose of

despairing people.” And he adds, “I almost

this canvas. “The painting is based on a story

drowned as a child. I know the weight of water

I heard from the artist Cathy Carman, whose

above one’s head.” Collated into a life’s work,

cousin was a fireman,” explains Maguire.

the painting inevitably throws forward toward

“He said that whenever they go looking for a

that of a drowning refugee / migrant in the

body in the Liffey, they always find more than

Aegean Sea.

they went looking for. They find others. Now,

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All Dublin Gives Its Tinker Kids Is Puss and Glue, 1983 Acrylic on canvas 60 × 45 ⅝ inches (152.5 × 116 cm) Nancy Kienholz, USA

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Lovelessness in Dublin, 1983 Acrylic and crayon on canvas 50 ⅜ × 39 ⅝ inches (128 × 100.5 cm) Christy and Valerie Moore, Dublin

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A Day in the Life, 1982 Acrylic on canvas 3 parts, 1.1 (p. 230), 1.3 (p. 232), 1.4 (p. 233): 60 ¼ × 22 inches (153 × 56 cm) 1 part, 1.2 (p. 231): 60 ¼ × 21 ⅝ inches (153 × 55 cm) Private Collection, Dublin

Maguire explains his depiction of his own nadir: “When I stopped drinking and started painting, I looked back at my own past. There the figure is lying on a bed, stomach heaving. Helplessly drunk. The vision seen by the figure is the same color as is the vomit inside him. I see a figure in the bar, drinking in order to be able to approach the women. And then there are the ex‑girlfriends, and their judgments.

Then there is the self. The figure has the air tickets, the art exhibitions, and the checkbook but also has that hole inside.

You cannot run away from yourself, but this painting is a good-bye to alcohol, good-bye to the bar.”

While works like this draws on his own experience, he retains the reality that all painting is fiction.

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Selected Chronology

1951 Brian Maguire is born in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland.

Regina; and Baxter Gallery, Portland School of Art, Portland, Maine. It completes its tour in 1987 at the Musée du Québec.

1968–69 He studies at the Dún Laoghaire Technical School in Dublin.

1986 Along with Patrick Graham, Patrick Hall, and Timothy Hawkesworth, Maguire takes part in the exhibition 4 Irish Expressionist Painters, organized by Boston College and Northeastern University.

1969–74 Maguire graduates in 1974 from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, where he was involved in the student revolution led by Paddy Gillan to modernize outmoded teaching practices.

1982 Maguire participates in Making Sense, an Arts Council of Ireland touring show.

1990 Maguire opens his first exhibition at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, marking the start of a professional relationship that continues to thrive almost thirty years later. In a collaboration, Maguire, along with architects Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, creates a temporary installation structure to represent Ireland in the 11 Cities / 11 Nations exhibition in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. This structure is later rebuilt for the inauguration of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in the summer of 1991.

1984 Maguire meets Edward and Nancy Kienholz in Berlin, and they begin to collect Maguire’s work.

1991 He participates in the group exhibition Inheritance and Transformation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

1985 He is invited by the National College of Art and Design, and the Department of Justice, Prisons, to develop a third-level special art course at Portlaoise Prison. Maguire is a constant participant in the program after its successful initial period and coordinates the program until its close in 2010.

1992 After a series of Arts Council artist residencies at Portlaoise Prison (1987), Mountjoy Prison, Dublin (1988), Cork Prison (1990), and several others, Maguire exhibits his first series, Prejudicial Portraits, at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. The exhibition includes a video work of the same title, based on the rules and regulations laid down by Irish law in 1947. The eightminute video wins the 1992 Arts Council Film Award.

1981 He exhibits in his first solo show, at the Lincoln Gallery, Dublin.

1985–87 Maguire exhibits his work in Divisions, Crossroads, Turns of the Mind: Some New Irish Art, curated by Lucy Lippard, the first major exhibition of contemporary Irish art to tour North America since 1970. It first exhibits at the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Mass., followed by the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; BANFF Centre School of Fine Arts, Alberta; Mackenzie Art Gallery, University of

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1993 Maguire is elected to be a member of Aosdána, an affiliation of creative artists in Ireland. He also receives a commission from the Derry City Council for the project Portraits from a Day Room. Painting the portraits of mentally ill men and women at Gransha Hospital, Maguire photographs the sitters and

their portraits and displays these photographs in light boxes at the hospital.

1994 He exhibits his work in a touring solo show, Paintings 90 / 93, at the Orchard Gallery, Derry; D’Arte Galleria, Helsinki; and the Limerick City Gallery of Art. The video work Prejudicial Portraits is screened at the Zeitgist International Film Festival, Glasgow.

1995 He is included in the group exhibition Irish Art 1770–1995 at the Fuller Craft Museum, Boston.

1998 Maguire is chosen to represent Ireland at the XXIV São Paulo Bienal. He is an artist-in-residence at Casa da Cultura, now known as the Centro Cultural Vila Prudente. There he creates a series of works in four stages: charcoal drawings of his pupils at the Casa da Cultura, a series of photographs of the portraits within the children’s homes, a series of twelve portraits of criminals whose photographs appeared over twelve consecutive days in the local newspaper, and a diptych commemorating the 1992 massacre of prisoners in Pavilion 9 of the State Prison, Carandiru.

1999 He participates in the group traveling exhibition When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth-Century Ireland. Beginning at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the show travels to the Berkeley Art Museum in California.

2000 As part of a grant from the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, thirteen artists work on eleven major projects across multiple disciplines to coincide with the construction of the Mater Hospital McAuley Building in Belfast. Maguire’s contribution is an installation of thirty portraits of patients and staff in the atrium of the new building.

The solo traveling exhibition Inside / Out begins this year, starting at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, followed by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and ending at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, in 2001. He is appointed professor, and head of the fine art faculty, at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, until 2010.

2001 Maguire participates in the Venice Biennale in the group exhibition Markers, curated by Ryszard Wasko.

2003 He receives a commission from the Belgium Public Art Commission for the project Citizen Geel at the Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum (OPZ), an integrated psychiatric center. During this time, he is also an artist-in-residence at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in Staten Island, New York, and at the Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan.

2005 As an artist-in-residence at the Fairgreen Homeless Shelter, Galway, Maguire presents his work in a solo exhibition titled Fairview Project. It is hosted by the Galway Arts Centre in collaboration with the Fairgreen Shelter.

2006 He participates in the ReOpening Exhibition at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Ireland.

2008 Maguire is commissioned to make new works for the construction of Wicklow County Council’s first dedicated library building in Blessington. The resulting series is titled Home.

2009 He leads a two-year, European-wide research project into art education in prisons in Romania, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and Ireland. He is an artist-in-residence at the Coolmine Therapeutic Centre, Dublin.

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2010 The works from the Wicklow County Council commission are presented in full in a solo exhibition titled Home at the Mermaid County Wicklow Arts Centre in Bray, County Wicklow. Maguire also begins a new project in which he speaks with bereaved families and collaborates with artists, journalists, and human rights activists to bring international attention to Ciudad Juárez.

2011 A new body of work focusing on public endeavor through the lens of history and economics is presented in the solo exhibition Notes on 14 Paintings at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

2012 Maguire exhibits his work in the solo exhibition Femicide / Juarez: Paintings by Brian Maguire, at the European Parliament in Brussels. He also participates in the documentary Skin in the Game, directed by Donald Taylor Black. The documentary examines the current financial and political crisis through the responses of several Irish artists who are using it as subject matter for their work.

2013 Blood Rising, a documentary directed by Mark McLoughlin in collaboration with Brian Maguire, featuring the artist and his work in Ciudad Juárez, premieres at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival in February. Maguire participates in the group exhibition Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art and Francis Bacon’s Studio, at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels. Skin in the Game is nominated for the George Morrison Best Feature Documentary Award at the 2013 Irish Film and Television Academy Awards.

2014 He participates in the group exhibitions Conversations, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and Return to Sender, at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels.

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2015 Maguire shows a series of works completed between 2012 and 2014 addressing the Mexican drug war, in the solo exhibition The Absence of Justice Demands This Act at Fergus McCaffrey, New York.

2016–17 In the solo exhibition Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, Maguire presents a new body of work that addresses issues of migration, displacement, and human dignity. In J’Accuse, shown at Void in Derry, Maguire brings together all his various paintings concerned with the war on drugs, including the feminocidio works and two new strands, the Grow House paintings and the Cocaine Laundry series.

2018 Brian Maguire’s latest body of work, a response to the refugee crises stemming from the Syrian conflict, is based on research he conducted in 2017 in a number of Syrian cities including Aleppo. This work is presented at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Following research in South Sudan’s Unity State, Maguire presents a set of drawings and paintings, in collaboration with the international humanitarian organization Concern Worldwide, at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin.

Maguire at Bentiu UN “Protection of Civilians” camp, Unity State, South Sudan, February 2018

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Public Collections

Arts Council Collection, Dublin, Ireland Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council, Dublin, Ireland Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland Jyväskylä Art Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland Kilkenny Art Gallery Collection, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland Liverpool University, Liverpool, UK Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA National Institute for Higher Education, Limerick, Ireland National Portrait Collection, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland Office of Public Works, Trim, Ireland Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum, Geel, Belgium Shankill Leisure Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland University College, Cork and Dublin, Ireland Wicklow County Council, Co. Wicklow, Ireland Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton, UK

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Author Biographies

Gavin Delahunty is a curator based in Dallas. He has organized numerous exhibitions including Truth: 24 Frames per Second, Walter De Maria: Counterpoint, and Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots. He is published widely, with forthcoming essays on Günther Förg and Joe Bradley.

Ed Vulliamy has been a writer for the Guardian and Observer newspapers for more than three decades, winning all major awards in British journalism for his coverage of violence in Bosnia, Iraq, Mexico, and elsewhere. He is the author of Amexica: War along the Borderline, which won the Ryszard Kapuściński Prize for literary reportage; The War Is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: The Reckoning; and When Words Fail: A Life with Music, War and Peace, among other books. As a British citizen, he lives in exile in the current United Kingdom.

Donald Kuspit began his career in art criticism in the 1970s writing for Artforum, Art in America, and various specialized philosophical journals. While Kuspit’s approach to art criticism often included analysis of the psychosocial dimensions of art, much of his work from the late 1970s and 1980s exhibits his enthusiasm for the artistic movement of Neo-Expressionism.

Kuspit is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism, and the author of New York Times best-selling books including The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist and The End of Art.

Thomas McEvilley was a poet, novelist, professor, and art critic. With a doctorate in philology, McEvilley wrote on Greek and Indian literature, culture, and the history of philosophy, as well as modern and postmodern art. He is the author of several acclaimed books including Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity, Art and Discontent: Theory at the Millennium, and The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism. He also wrote extensively on international contemporary artists as a contributor for Artforum and Art in America, and as the editor-in-chief of Contemporanea. He received numerous awards including the Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism.

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Published October 2018 by Fergus McCaffrey, New York and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin Fergus McCaffrey 514 West 26th Street New York NY 10001 USA tel: +1 212 988 2200 e-mail: info@fergusmccaffrey.com www.fergusmccaffrey.com Kerlin Gallery Anne’s Lane South Anne Street Dublin 2 Ireland tel: +353 1 670 9093 e-mail: gallery@kerlin.ie www.kerlin.ie 1,200 copies ISBN: 978-0-9976958-1-6 Edited by Richard Slovak Designed by Tony Waddingham Proofreading by Rosa Abbott Cover: Aleppo 4, 2017, acrylic on linen 78 ¾ × 157 ½ inches (200 × 400 cm) © 2018 Fergus McCaffrey and Kerlin Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

All works, unless otherwise stated, © Brian Maguire All words © the authors “Brian Maguire at the XXIV São Paulo Bienal” first published in Casa da Cultura © Thomas McEvilley, New York, August 1998; 2018 The Thomas McEvilley Archive LLC

Photography credits Pages 2, 61–67, 73, 75, 89, 91, 95, 105–9, 115, 128, 129, 139, 187, 189, 199–203, 207, 229–33: Eugene Langan Photography Pages 7, 57, 59, 78–81, 96–99, 101, 103, 156–63, 209, 211, 225: Denis Mortell Photography

“Brian Maguire” first published in Brian Maguire exhibition catalogue by Douglas Hyde Gallery, TCD, Dublin and the Orchard Gallery, Derry, February, 1988 © Donald Kuspit

Pages 10, 148, 150, 151: Brian Maguire

Image credits Unless otherwise indicated, all works are by Brian Maguire: © Brian Maguire, Courtesy of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, and Fergus McCaffrey, New York

Page 83: ShootArt

Pages 7, 57, 59 Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe Pages 119, 201, 203 Courtesy of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane Pages 128, 129 Courtesy of Openbaar Psychiatrisch Zorgcentrum, Geel Pages 130, 151, 156–63, 211, 225 Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Page 133 Courtesy of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Page 153 Courtesy of Museu de Arte do Rio Page 167 Courtesy of Wolverhampton Art Gallery Page 197 Courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork Page 209 Courtesy of The Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin

Pages 14–23, 36–39, 111, 131: Kerlin Gallery Pages 25–35: Guy Hersant Page 50: Mike Hackett Pages 69, 71, 77: Grégoire Cheneau Pages 84–87: The Copper House Gallery Pages 183, 184: Sam Gallagher Pages 192–95, 205, 213, 219–23, 227: J. Craig Sweat Page 237: Steve De Neef