We acknowledge and pay respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the Country upon which Martin Browne Contemporary stands. © Martin Browne Contemporary © All images copyright of the artist. 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: Bianca Luciano
PHOTOGRAPHER: Omid Daghigi
SEPARATIONS: Spitting Image, Sydney
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
- Dylan Thomas
In 2019 Tim Maguire began revisiting the historical Dutch and Flemish pictorial genre he had made his own in the early 1990s, reviewing it through the filter of his pictorial explorations over the intervening decades.
This recent suite of paintings of 2023–2024, entitled Lost and Found, inflates the lush visuality of the earlier 1990s floral still-lifes yet is reframed by radical differences in their photographic sourcing, production and pictorial outcomes. These are driven in turn by the continual revisions and tensions of Maguire’s hybrid, genre-crossing painting practice, with its innovative interleaving of contemporary media forms from analogue to digital technologies.
The seventeenth and eighteenth century floral still life genre, popular in the affluent good times of the Dutch “Golden Age” or Dutch Baroque, offered lavish and unlikely arrangements of cut flowers (from all seasons) as precautionary signifiers of life’s transience. These abundant bouquets of visual pleasure served as precisely naturalistic reminders to wealthy patrons that the days of wine and roses were not long or lasting.
Maguire had gravitated to the genre in 1989, on his return to Australia after several years of restless travel and exhibiting in Europe and America, settling in the Blue Mountains with his artist wife, Adrienne Gaha, for the birth of his son, Max, then a daughter Lily. These new lives countered his own early history: the sudden loss of his father as a young child, and a traumatic night train accident in January 1976, shortly after finishing high school.(1) This tragic event, and his long recovery, changed the presumed course of Maguire’s life as a teacher. It led in 1980 to art schooling in Sydney, a formative postgraduate year at the renowned Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in 1985, and on to an artist’s life, initially enacted through self-impaired experimental performances, and then through alternating, apparently disparate, series of landscape and abstract representations, all “rubbing up against each other” in an energetic pictorial exchange.(2)
So by 1989 the cool objective gaze of the historical still life genre, with its sumptuous visual presence and quiet exhalation of life embalmed, held both creative and personal appeal for Maguire as “a site of possibilities”. It chimed with his early recoil from 1980s’ abstract expressionism and with his “preoccupations with mortality” at the time. It also allowed him the freedom to work from found photographic source imagery, firstly extracting a small detail, then enlarging it, like a cinematic close up; breaking down the original before reconstructing the image through his interventions of scale, gesture, thin layers of colour wash and splashed solvent – all deployed to animate the paintings surface and introduce“elements of chance”.(3)
By asserting the pictorial process (and its representation) over the reproduced historical source, Maguire found “his own paintings within somebody else’s”.(4) It was an “effacement” process of image and self — at once contained and improvised — he described as “a delicate interplay between control and randomness”, to be experienced rather than explained, like his early performance work, or a game of golf, a favoured pastime.(5)
As Maguire mined the still life genre’s pictorial possibilities–its alluring tension between the real and the artificial, nature and naturalism, reality and illusion–he would claim no special allegiance to its symbolic meaning, prioritising instead the painterly process, “the event” of its production, (“If the flower paintings mean anything, it’s to do with the way they are made.”)(6) To further detach from any assumed allusions to the genre’s symbolism, Maguire’s paintings by 1992 were identified only by numbers. The evocative themed solo exhibition titles of the 1980s were abandoned, only reappearing in 2008 and continued ever since.
Over the last two decades, Maguire’s practice has responded to nature or nature in extremis, working from his own or found digital photographs, through different media forms: panoramic digital pigment prints of snowflakes, lightbox works of fire-ravaged landscapes, paintings from digitally sourced almond blossoms, and his own videos of light playing on water. This focus on images of destruction and regeneration, the fragility and fabulous persistence of life, drew on Maguire’s own photographs of the destructive aftermath of natural catastrophic events, the burnt-out landscapes of Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday bushfires and those of 2019-2020.
Maguire’s return to the historical still-life genre in 2019, first shown at Martin Browne Contemporary in his 2020 exhibition Small Worlds, expanded on these concerns, encouraged by his sense of “a new resonance between the morality tales of the original painting and the current threats to our natural world.”(7) This revived focus offered different stylistic opportunities for Maguire’s re-take on the genre, along with his persistent interest in the aesthetics of life’s transience and the no small matter of beauty, “visual pleasure”, “the language of visual affect,,.the rhetoric of how things look…the iconography of desire.”(8). For, over the years, Maguire’s figurative vocabulary, one way or another, has gravitated towards the light in the dark, to the “bracelet of bright hair about the bone”, rather than to “the bone”, a reliquary image coined by the 16th century poet, John Donne (1572-1631), as if predicting the later symbolic aesthetics of the Dutch floral still-life painters.
For this exhibition’s new iteration of the historical genre, entitled Lost and Found, Maguire has enlisted the late Baroque paintings of Jan van Huysum (1682–1749), called by his contemporaries “the phoenix of all flower painters”. Van Huysum’s refined compositional and secretive technical skills drew on the example of the earlier painter, Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606–1684), for instance, with his inclusion of insects. As one of the last active (and most successful) floral and fruit still life painters in the Netherlands, van Huysum unusually worked from his own sketches of rare flowers, sourced from summer visits to Haarlem’s herbarium. His profuse floral set pieces, for all their seeming spontaneity, featured flowers from all seasons in states of bloom and decay, with equally exquisite renderings of insects and dewdrops on petals and leaves. Distinguished by their bright light backgrounds, swirling arabesques and dense efflorescence, van Huysum’s paintings, with their confected style and lavish content, are reimagined through the lens of Maguire’s evolved technical skills and pictorial priorities. With the “hi-fi” advances of digital reproduction at his disposal, Maguire could focus on pieces of visual information he “would have glossed over in the past – bugs, butterflies, water droplets”, signs of life all present in the Lost and Found paintings.(9)
Like their historical sources, Maguire’s current paintings offer an abundance of dazzling detail, all charged with visual information, if not emotion. By emulating the inflated stylistic flourishes, glazed visual theatrics and convoluted forms of the original, they seem to accentuate and enhance the genre’s pictorial vocabulary, rather than disperse and dissolve it, as he had done in the past. Where once the haunting chiaroscuro effects of Maguire’s early 1990s flower “portraits”, as they were then described, mutely reflected the aura of their age and “lo-fi” reproduction, these new pellucid, hyper-real forms emerge from the impassive “hi-fi” gaze of a computer for activation by the artist’s painterly interventions.(10)
In this exhibition, Untitled 20230201 (2023) and Untitled 20240302 (2024) the two most expansive paintings, are sourced from a small detail of a digital reproduction of Jan van Huysum’s Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, (c.1715), in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Here, and in the smaller paintings, Maguire sets up the tiny against the vast; the minute detail against the sumptuous spectacle, enacting the high-pitched intensity and arrested tumbling of the historical model’s floral effulgence. Viewed up close, the painterly flourishes and splattered solvent of Maguire’s brushwork unravel the precise rendering of the whole digital image, asserting, as ever, the dynamic exchange between his abstracting and figurative representations.
Maguire’s new flowers, as with their historical precedents, may be from nature but they are not natural (blue leaves, red wheat!). The single floral paintings — a striated tulip, hydrangea or peony, historically “hothouse flowers” — are “strangely familiar”, weirdly unlikely, perhaps botanical specimens from a fantasy world.(11) Visually engulfing and suspended in an airless liminal space between full bloom and decay, these flower paintings achieve their hallucinatory effects by Maguire’s pictorial overlapping of virtual and physical worlds; and they embody his ongoing conflation of image and surface, production and reproduction, presence and effacement, to dislodge our viewing expectations. If Maguire regards a painting as “a frozen moment in time”, then these flower works allow our close encounter with the ineluctable embrace of the past and the present.
NOTES
(1)Glenbrook, NSW, 16 January 1976, at around 22.45 a goods train ploughed into the rear of a stalled electric passenger train with 40 passengers near Glenbrook station, in the Blue Mountains, killing one person and injuring 10 others.
(2)The term used by Lakin, S., “Painting under duress: Tim Maguire’s Colour Separations 1998-2003”, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2003
(3)Maguire read George Cockcroft/Luke Reinhart’s book The Dice Man (1971) in 1976, about a psychiatrist who makes daily decisions based on the casting of a dice so that his life becomes sequences of chance, taking himself out of the equation. Maguire said that was his approach to painting. Cf., Lakin, ibid.; See also Tim Maguire quoted in ‘What is it ‘as it really is?’, Maguire T., Godfrey T., and Watkins J., Tim Maguire, Piper Press, Sydney, 2007, p. 119. Maguire’s Dice Abstracts exhibition, Tolarno Galleries, 2019 directly explored this action with a computer dice.
(4)Maguire, ibid. p. 131.
(5) Maguire, “I identify very much with the golfing analogy Chuck Close makes in reference to his own paintings, that you don’t know you’ve made a really good drive until you get to the putting green.” ibid. p. 135. See also http://jnack.com/blog/2021/06/12/chuck-close-on-golf-creativity/ (6) Maguire, ibid. p. 100
(7) Maguire, T., “Small Worlds”, exhibition introduction, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney, 2020 (8) Hickey, D., The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Art issues Press, Los Angeles,1995, p.12 (9) Maguire, T., “HI-FI, LO-FI”, exhibition introduction, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 2023 (10) See Searle, A., Tim Maguire, Moet & Chandon, Epernay, France, 1994, p. 3 ‘A close-up portrait of a bloom, far larger than life and bursting beyond the confines of the painting’s edge…’.
(11) See Hickey, D., op.cit. p. 18. (“As Baudelaire says, ‘the beautiful is always strange’, by which he means, of course, that it is always strangely familiar.”)
1. Untitled 20240201, 2024, oil on canvas,181 x 322 cm
2. Untitled 20231201, 2023, oil on canvas,148 x 160 cm
3. Untitled 20231202, 2023, ink and oil on canvas, 120 x 262 cm
4. Untitled 20240101, 2024, oil on canvas,160 x 148 cm
5. Untitled 20240302, 2024, oil on canvas, 185 x 548 cm
6. Untitled 20240202, 2024, oil on canvas,122 x 213 cm
7. Untitled 20240301, 2024, oil on canvas, 174 x 180 cm
8. Untitled 20240203, 2024, oil on canvas, 137 x 153 cm
9. Untitled 20240102, 2024, oil on canvas,150 x 150 cm
10. Untitled 20230201, 2023, oil on canvas, 210 x 404 cm
Untitled 20231201, 2023 Oil on canvas, 148 x 160 cm
Untitled 20231202, 2023
Ink and oil on canvas, 120 x 262 cm
1958 Born in Chertsey, United Kingdom
Lives and works in Australia and France.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024 Lost and Found, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
2023 Hi-fi, Lo-fi, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
2023 APW Artist Fellowship Program Exhibition, Australian Print Workshop Gallery, Melbourne
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
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023 Art of Connecting – 10 Year Anniversary exhibition, Bank of America, Sydney, Australia
2022 New Australian Printmaking, Ian Potter
2021 Echoes of Laocoön, ILEANA Contemporary Art, New Farm, QLD
2020 Chromatopia, Recent Acquisitions, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
2019 Earth Sea Sky, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
2018 National Art: Part One, National Art School Gallery, Sydney
2018 All we can’t see, Yellow House Gallery, Sydney
2018 Couplings, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney
2016 Flora Australis, Bega Regional Gallery, New South Wales
2016 Digital Generation- Artist from the Digital Generation, Tonbridge School,Tonbridge UK
2015 De La Pierre a l’Ecran- Franck Bordas, Centre de la Gravure et de l”Image Imprimée, La Louviere, Belgium
2015 Light Play : Ideas, Optics and Atmosphere,University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane
2015 Botanica, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
2012 All the Flowers, Benalla Art Gallery, Benalla
2012 Hot town, summer in the city…, Galerie Andreas Binder, Münich
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
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales
Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales
Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville
Philip Morris Arts Grant Collection,
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane
Siemens AG SFS, Munich
Tamar Collection, Tasmania
Tarra Warra Museum of Art, Victoria, Australia
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart
The New Art Gallery Walsall
University of Melbourne, Melbourne
University of Sydney, Sydney
University of Launceston, Tasmania
Zurich Insurance, Zurich
