TIM MAGUIRE REGENERATION
28 April - 22 May 2022
© Martin Browne Contemporary © All images copyright Tim Maguire This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. COMPILER: James Edwards PHOTOGRAPHER: Penny Clay COLOUR SEPARATIONS: Spitting Image, Sydney Cover Image: Untitled 20210601 (detail), 2021, oil on canvas, 160 x 233 cm
MARTIN BROWNE CONTEMPORARY 15 HAMPDEN STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021 TEL: 02 9331 7997 FAX: 02 9331 7050 info@martinbrownecontemporary.com www.martinbrownecontemporary.com GALLERY TUESDAY--SATURDAY SUNDAY 10:30AM GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY 10:30AM--6PM 6PM SUNDAY & MONDAY BY APPOINTMENT
LIST OF WORKS Untitled 20210801, 2021, oil on canvas, 175 x 150 cm (opposite) Untitled 20210601, 2021, oil on canvas, 160 x 233 cm Untitled 20210901, 2021, oil on canvas, 153 x 137 cm Untitled 20220302, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 213 cm Untitled 20220301, 2022, oil on canvas, 168 x 153 cm Untitled 20220102, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 153 cm Untitled 20220103, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 153 cm Untitled 20220105, 2022, oil on canvas, 122 x 112 cm Untitled 20210903, 2021, oil on canvas, 180 x 174 cm Untitled 20220201, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 153 cm Untitled 20210403, 2021, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm Untitled 20211101, 2021, oil on canvas, 168 x 153 cm Untitled 20220104, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 165 cm Untitled 20211001, 2021, oil on canvas, 153 x 137 cm Untitled 20210402, 2021, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm Untitled 20220101, 2022, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm
TIM MAGUIRE: REGENERATION Tim Maguire began making super-close-up flower paintings in 1989, the year he became a father. Initially they were based on passages selected from vanitas and other still-life paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists of the 17th and early 18th centuries, images of which he found in books and online. Harnessing low-res and often quite small reproductions of these highly detailed distillations of nature, he set about reproducing them at grand scale in a loose and fluid style. As digital photography emerged over the next decade, the artist began supplementing these readymade historical images with his own photos to allow himself a wider field of reference. Maguire was especially fond of the nascent digital medium’s quirks – the strange flares of light, the lines of colour that contour a shape, the fuzziness occasioned by a limited depth of field – faithfully incorporating such ‘fails’ into each canvas. He has since amassed an image library of motifs including poppies, viburnum berries, cherry blossoms, waterlilies, trees in snow, and bushland regenerating after fire. Honed over 20-plus years, Maguire’s distinctive technique sees him build up three successive layers of colour – first yellow, then magenta and finally cyan – in transparent oil glazes on a white ground to mimic the colour-separation process of commercial printing. Informed by his own forays into printmaking, especially lithography and monotype, the artist performs the function of a ‘human printer’ in an effort to approximate the glowing, translucent qualities of digital images viewed on screens. As each layer dries, Maguire splashes it with solvent that eats away at the oil paint to reveal flecks of colour beneath. As this new suite of paintings affirms, Maguire remains committed to floral and other botanical subject matter. His painting of burnt bushland, Untitled 20210801, is based on photos the artist took a year after catastrophic fire tore through the Victorian township of Kinglake in the Black Saturday tragedy of 2009. Epicormic growth sprouts from the trunk of a central gum, surrounded on all sides by the spidery silhouettes of other eucalypts yet to recover. Maguire has wiped or splashed solvent into the colour layers to expose the underlying colour - these incursions read as both multicoloured embers and water droplets on a camera lens.
Poppies are transformed into cathedrals of candy-coloured light. Jumbo waterlilies with piecrust collars, snapped in Maclean in NSW’s Northern Rivers region, float on serene, reflective ponds. White blossoms captured in Orange perform a light show against a mauve-to-blue sky, with the artist careful to replicate the source photo’s out-of-focus elements. Pink cherry blossoms from Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden stretch their butterfly petals towards sunlight, while a hydrangea the colour of celadon and a pendulous rose in cream and butter tones nod to the artist’s continuing interest in Dutch and Flemish still-life precedents. Maguire originally focused on flowers for their allegorical potential as much as for their formal qualities as a new father, he was thinking about mortality and the preciousness of life. He subsequently downplayed the importance of symbolism in his work, reluctant to wade into the waters of interpretation. Instead, he has prioritised technique and process as a way of exploiting the tension between representation and abstraction. More recently, however, the artist has been meditating on his choices in subject matter and what they might stand for. “I’m interested in breaking images down and reconstituting them. One could say I’m interested in states of coalescence and dissolution, and these terms are relevant both to what I’m painting and the methods I’ve devised to do that,” says Maguire. “The transparent skeins of liquid paint are applied loosely and thinly, then subjected to random splatterings of solvent that threaten to dissolve my handiwork, suggesting a fragility of the image,” he says. “Yet as the exhibition title, Regeneration, suggests, the subject matter is significant. These are paintings about life cycles – native bushland with its capacity for spectacular regrowth, the momentary beauty of fragile poppy flowers, ephemeral plays of light on water, blossoms budding and blooming on mossy old branches before blowing away.” Tony Magnusson
Untitled 20210601, 2021, oil on canvas, 160 x 233 cm
Untitled 20210901, 2021, oil on canvas, 153 x 137 cm
Untitled 20220302, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 213 cm
Untitled 20220301, 2022, oil on canvas, 168 x 153 cm
Untitled 20220102, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 153 cm
Untitled 20220103, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 153 cm
Untitled 20220105, 2022, oil on canvas, 122 x 112 cm
Untitled 20210903, 2021, oil on canvas, 180 x 174 cm
Untitled 20220201, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 153 cm
Untitled 20210403, 2021, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
Untitled 20211101, 2021, oil on canvas, 168 x 153 cm
Untitled 20220104, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 165 cm
Untitled 20211001, 2021, oil on canvas, 153 x 137 cm
Untitled 20210402, 2021, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm
Untitled 20220101, 2022, oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm
Untitled 20220304, 2022, oil on canvas, 145 x 220 cm
Untitled 20220303, 2022, oil on canvas, 153 x 153 cm
TIM MAGUIRE 1958 Born in Chertsey, United Kingdom Lives and works in Australia and France. SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2022 Regeneration, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2022 Tim Maguire: Lines of Inquiry, ILEANA, Brisbane 2021 Old World, New World, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 2020 Small Worlds, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2019 Dice Abstracts, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 2018 Reflective, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2018 Everything Changes: Tim Maguire 2002 - 2017, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle 2017 Tim Maguire, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Sydney 2017 The Floating World, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 2016 Transient, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2015 Photosynthesis, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 2015 New Prints, Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne 2014 Near and Far, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2014 Tim Maguire: The Douglas Kagi Gift, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville 2013 A Device for Viewing the Landscape, installation commissioned by Allens Linklaters, Deutsche Bank Building, Sydney 2012 Time and Nature, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2012 Tim Maguire, 19 View Street, Tolarno Galleries in association with The Swansea Gallery, Perth 2012 Tolarno Galleries at Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne 2011 Other Light, Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich 2011 Tim Maguire, Von Lintel Gallery, New York 2011 Light Fall 2011, The Australian Club, Melbourne 2011 Light Works, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney 2010 Light and Water, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 2010 Light and Water, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney 2009 Refractions, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland 2009 Light Fall, Von Lintel Gallery, New York 2008 Tim Maguire, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne 2008 Tim Maguire, Galerie Couvrat Desvergnes, Paris 2008 Snow, Water and Flowers, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2007 Tim Maguire, Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich 2007 Tim Maguire, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney 2007 Tim Maguire, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
AWARDS 1993 Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship 1989 Dobell Prize for Drawing, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1986 Hugh Williamson Award (Best Male Emerging Artist), Ballarat, Victoria 1985 Jury Prize, Third International Drawing Triennale, Nuremberg 1984 Peter Brown Memorial Scholarship, Australia Council 1981 The Rural Bank Painting Prize
SELECTED PUBLIC AND CORPORATE COLLECTIONS Academisch Ziekenhuis, Leiden Allens Linklaters, Sydney, London and New York ANZ Bank, Melbourne Artbank, Australia Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Australian Club, Melbourne Australian Club, Sydney Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria British Museum, London Credit Suisse, Australia Darwin College of Advanced Education, Darwin Deakin University, Melbourne Derwent Collection, Tasmania Deutsche Bank, London Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, London, UK Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria Griffith Artworks, Brisbane Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria JMH Bank, Frankfurt Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg Macquarie Group, Syndey Melbourne Club, Melbourne McClelland Gallery & Sculpture Park, Langwarrin, Victoria Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart National Gallery of Australia, Canberra SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2021 Echoes of Laocoön, ILEANA Contemporary Art, New Farm, QLD Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales 2020 Chromatopia, Recent Acquisitions, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales 2019 Earth Sea Sky, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra 2018 National Art : Part One, National Art School Gallery, Sydney Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville 2018 All we can’t see, Yellow House Gallery, Sydney Philip Morris Arts Grant Collection, 2018 Couplings, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2016 Flora Australis, Bega Regional Gallery, New South Wales Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2016 Digital Generation- Artist from the Digital Generation, Tonbridge School, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Tonbridge UK Siemens AG SFS, Munich 2015 De La Pierre a l’Ecran- Franck Bordas, Centre de la Gravure et de l”Image Tamar Collection, Tasmania Imprimée, La Louviere, Belgium Tarra Warra Museum of Art, Victoria, Australia 2015 Light Play : Ideas, Optics and Atmosphere, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane The New Art Gallery Walsall 2015 Botanica, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney University of Melbourne, Melbourne 2012 All the Flowers, Benalla Art Gallery, Benalla University of Sydney, Sydney 2012 Hot town, summer in the city…, Galerie Andreas Binder, Münich University of Launceston, Tasmania 2012 MONOuno Exhbition, Albury Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales Zurich Insurance, Zurich 2012 Estampes Numériques, Galerine Catherine Putman, Paris 2011 Boundary Line, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville