Maggie Brink: Painting Now 2024

Living and working in Myponga, South Australia, Maggie Brink is fascinated by the capacity for painting to transcend the visible and serve as a container for ineffable and elusive emotional currents. Drawing on a personal archive of digitally mediated images, the artist refracts her eclectic source material through a painterly haze, relishing the disorientation and fragmentation that emerges as her pictures cohere through gauzy, glitchy, ghost-like layers.

Following her star turn at this year’s Melbourne Art Fair and building on the success of a small but rapturously received suite of solo exhibitions, Brink’s showing in Painting Now will be her Eora/Sydney debut, presenting a sequence of ethereal, transportive and strangely bewitching works that offer intriguing gestures to worlds beyond the frame.

“A Venn diagram overlapping fairytales, pop music and fantasy might offer a lens through which to view this work,” says the artist, whose new paintings respond to film and video screenshots, including Malá mořská víla, the 1976 Czech adaptation of The Little Mermaid. “However, my reflections on these themes didn’t seek resolution. I embraced a disorienting process typical of my studio research practice.”

Channelling the ambiguities that arise in the afterlife of found images, Brink transforms her references in ways that speak to unspoken, inchoate desires. “One morning, I noticed I was painting people who seemed to want to touch something,” she says. “Maybe they were frustrated or wondered what it would mean to touch the invisible world. I listened to the Buzzcocks’ Why Can’t I Touch It? on repeat that day.” These curious attachments form a throughline for the otherwise disparate, sometimes dissipating scenes of Brink’s Painting Now series, eschewing fixed meanings in favour of a floating, dreamlike mood.

Maggie Brink is represented by ReadingRoom, and appears courtesy of ReadingRoom.

Works by Maggie Brink can now be previewed and acquired by request. Please email dean@michaelreid.com.au