Archive
November
Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi
Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi is Tim Maguire’s 16th solo show with Tolarno Galleries, a partnership that celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
Started in 2005 and re-visited in 2023, the earliest painting in the exhibition stands at the Lo-Fi end of the fidelity spectrum.
At the Hi-Fi end, is the exhibition’s tour de force: Untitled 20230201. Measuring 212 x 404 cm, it has a purity of colour and a clarity similar to computer screens and digital photography. This widescreen work is a stunningly detailed reproduction of a passage taken from Jan van Huysum’s Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, c. 1715, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
I could never have painted this work based on the source imagery that was available in the 1990s, says Tim Maguire.
My early Dutch flower paintings were very lo-fi, in part because the reproductions I was relying on were poor, taken from postcards or books.
The new paintings are a product of the high-resolution reproductions now available. They are a far cry from the dimly lit, heavily varnished and poorly reproduced paintings that were my starting point in the 1990s.
Early on, I applied paint loosely with big brushes and splashes of solvent. Those paintings were about breaking down the image as much as they were about building it up.
Accompanying the paintings in Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi, are 24 prints from Maguire’s ongoing Dice Abstracts series, first shown at Tolarno Galleries in 2019 and in New Australian Printmaking at NGV in 2022.
February
Old World, New World
An exhibition of large scale paintings created using Tim Maguire’s colour separation technique. The works are influenced by 17th century Dutch still life, memento mori and the aftermath of Australia’s recent bushfires.
Image: Tim Maguire Untitled 20200902 2020, oil on canvas, 153 x 168 cm
March
Dice Abstracts
Tim Maguire’s new series of prints, Dice Abstracts, premiered at Tim Maguire | Mixing Numbers: A Survey of Prints and Video 2003–2018 at Maitland Regional Art Gallery in November 2018. Drawing on imagery from his 1980s early works – simple landscape elements such as points of light on darkness, horizons, bands of light and reflection – Maguire devised the Dice Abstracts concept.
These simple elements were initially drawn in charcoal on textured paper and scanned. Using the throw of dice, the elements can be combined randomly to determine the base image, its horizontal/vertical orientation and positive/negative nature. Repeated three times – one throw for each of the three primary colours red, blue and yellow – the three coloured images are combined digitally. In total, there are 13,824 possible Dice Abstracts. In the parameters of Maguire’s project, each potential iteration can only be printed once.
Tim Maguire and Dorian Ford will collaborate on the performance To the Surface at Melbourne Recital Centre on Thursday 23 May, combining Maguire’s ambient, meditative video projections with Ford’s improvised jazz for piano.
Image: Tim Maguire AU526-551-312 2018, 112 x 112 cm paper size, archival pigment ink on paper
May
Photosynthesis
February
TOLARNO GALLERIES at Melbourne Art Fair
Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne
STAND E23
April
Light and Water
