TIM MAGUIRE, B. 1958

Mori Gallery, Sydney

Corporate collection, Sydney

Born in England, Tim Maguire moved to Melbourne with his Australian parents and grew up in Melbourne and Sydney. He first trained as an artist in Sydney; then won a scholarship to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied in 1985 under the influential Dutch photographer, Jan Dibbets. Since winning the prestigious Moët et Chandon Artists’ Fellowship in 1993, Maguire has based his career in Europe. He moved from France to England in 2002.

Although he has been inspired by the long tradition of European still-life painting – and indeed has used historical paintings as a source of imagery – Maguire’s renowned flower paintings are mostly worked from nature. As he told Louise Bellamy, writing for the Melbourne Age at the time of his most recent exhibition of new work at Tolarno Galleries, it was the Moët et Chandon award that brought his flower subjects (and later fruit) into the spotlight, but he has always maintained that his subject matter is painting itself, rather than depiction. ‘His "model" or "sketch" is initially achieved by transferring details of his own digital photograph to computer, manipulating it, separating it into three constituent colour parts and printing it. These "models'' are then painted onto canvas in separate transparent layers of oil colour. Maguire then flicks solvent over each of the colour fields, dragging a dry brush over the surface. He says the process is "mechanical in origin but organic in application"’.¹

Maguire has now brought his unique synthesis of digital technology and painterly craftsmanship to a range of imagery, always fascinated by the way in which his painting techniques could reproduce – indeed intensify – the luminosity of the digital photograph. Untitled 98U41 epitomises the blending of traditional subject matter with dramatic abstraction that took him to the forefront of contemporary international artistic practice.

1. Bellamy, L., ‘Tim Maguire’, The Age, Melbourne, 5 November 2005. See also the artist’s website, www.tim-maguire.com.

Please note this lot is subject to G.S.T.