Lot 17

Work is in overall good condition with very minor wear to the edges, small abbrasion right hand edge approx 3mm in length.


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Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney (label verso)
Private collection, Victoria

Godfrey, T., Maguire, T., Watkins, J., Tim Maguire, Piper Press, Sydney, 2007, p. 124-125 (illus.)

Tim Maguire's paintings depict the beauty of nature, with luxurious blooms and plump rich fruits depicted in close details across large-scale canvases. They also, however, express the transience of nature, much like the work of the Dutch masters.

In the seventeenth century, Dutch still-life paintings were more than meets the eye, often possessing a moral function. Although they celebrated the beauty of nature and all its bounties, they also depicted elements of memento mori (reminders of death). This may have been done through the depiction of insects, skulls, falling petals, or shriveling fruit, for example.

"I first started using these Dutch floral still-lifes as subject matter for my paintings in the early 1990s. In those days, the only imagery I could access was low-resolution. My reference materials were muddy reproductions in books, or the occasional blurry postcard collected in a museum. By the time I had zoomed in on the photo, and found a composition in it, the source image was in some cases reduced to a few square centimetres - which I then blew up a thousand-fold onto canvases of up to 2 x 6 metres. This cropping and enlarging reduced the botanical details to simple shapes and colours, and I sometimes had no idea which part of which plant the areas of my paintings represented." (The Artist, 2020)

Tim Maguire's technique of layering leads to an almost psychedelic intensity of colour and texture. He applies thin layers of paint, similar to a mechanical printing process, overlaying magenta, cyan and yellow to build up the richness of colour. Then, he activates the surface by pulling the layers back using droplets of solvent creating a sort of bleeding and blistering of paint surface. The result leaves the viewer wanting to draw inwards to the work and inspect the painstaking detail of the surface yet also stand back and absorb the overall grandeur of his works and their cinematic scale.

All the elements combined result in Maguire's now renowned interplay between still life and cinema, figuration and abstraction, the beautiful and the monstrous, and the seemingly domestic yet also exotic.

Olivia Fuller | Head of Art

Tim Maguire is represented by Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne