Lot 19

Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 2005
Private collection, Sydney

Martin Browne Fine Art at the Auckland Art Fair, New Zealand, 1-4 September 2005

"All paintings are frozen moments of time" - Tim Maguire 2017 (1)

Enveloping the viewer in a velvety surround which delicately balances the enlargement of scale and the touch of the artist's hand, Tim Maguire's Untitled 20050804 is both a summary of his artistic practice of the 1990's and a departure from it.

In 1989 Maguire began a series of paintings in which he drew imagery and inspiration from 17th century Dutch and Flemish still-life paintings. This subject matter allowed him to explore his interest in vanitas and its symbolic reference to mortality. He took tiny details from reproductions of the original paintings and scaled these up transferring them onto large-scale canvases. With the arrival of digital photography in the late 90's Maguire's source material began to exclusively rely upon his own photographs. It was from the luminosity of digital imagery that he developed his renowned colour-separation process, now almost synonymous with his name. (1)

Traditionally known for his bold, bright and colourful canvases how then do we approach a monochromatic Maguire work? In typical Maguire fashion, not everything is as it seems. His monochromatic paintings are in fact a further investigation into the colour-separation process and are not entirely monochromatic at all; each black contains a trace of colour. In the early 2000's Maguire's methodology had developed to a point where the tonal range of each colour was digitally generated and printed photographically in black and white as the artist's reference, and it was in studying these images repeatedly that Maguire became intrigued in the idea of exploring the monochromatic effect of working with a single colour. For his exhibition at Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich in 2003 his new series of monochrome paintings were worked up from a single colour layer during a single session in the studio, allowing less time for intervention by the artist and reinvigorating his deliberate play between control and randomness. (2)

Two years later, in the current work, we see a progression in this technique where the imagery is sharper and the tension heightened. The effect is almost that of a vintage black and white photograph which sees the flatness of photography co-existing with the depth of the painter's brush. The striking contrast of black and white selectively elaborates details in the composition such as the curve of the petal's edge, whilst concealing others in the shadows. Being almost devoid of colour the painting becomes even more effective in conveying the structure and movement of an image and it enables the viewers eye to rest upon textures on the surface in a way that may be lost in a riot of colour. Achieving a sense of beautiful simplicity, Untitled 20050804 retains many of Maguire's hallmarks including the enlargement of scale, the liquidity of paint applied with a broad brush, and the use of the still-life as a symbol of the passage of time. (1)

Madeleine Norton | Senior Fine Art Specialist

(1) - Tim Maguire, Everything changes: Tim Maguire 2002-2017, Newcastle Art Gallery, 2017
(2) - Bruce Millar, Tim Maguire: New Works, Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich, 2003


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