TIM MAGUIRE

Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above  

Tony Godfrey, Tim Maguire and Jonathan Watkins, Tim Maguire, Piper Press, Sydney, 2007, p. 231, illus.

Good condition. There is a scratch lower left approximately 2cm long and an area of very small paint loss bottom right margin, edges have been scuffed.
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Since winning the prestigious Moët & Chandon Fellowship in 1993, Tim Maguire has enjoyed critical acclaim and market success both in Australia and overseas. His outsize canvases of fruit and flowers are both dramatic and decorative, grotesque and beautiful.

Like that of many contemporary painters, Maguire's work is photographically based, but the source imagery is extensively manipulated, being cropped, enlarged and mechanically separated into its component colours, after the manner of printing technologies. Each chromatic screen is then separately painted by the artist, and in between each layer the canvas is sprayed with solvent. This spattering creates both a link and a barrier between the various colours, and gives the work its characteristic soft, distressed, almost neo-impressionist surface. While this elaborate technique is quintessentially postmodern in its clinical, cynical complexity, the subject matter is quite evidently pre-modern: the emblematic still life vocabulary of the seventeenth century Netherlandish masters.

This major painting from 2005 is a fine example of the artist's mature work, combining an intense materiality and sensuality which borders on the erotic with sweetly melancholic reflections on the transience of life.