Maggie Brink: Painting Now 2024
- Maggie Brink
- 24 Oct—23 Nov 2024
- Eora / Sydney
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, where her work was presented by ReadingRoom, and building on the success of a small but rapturously received suite of solo exhibitions, Brink’s showing in Painting Now comprises 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
What initially drew you to painting and how have you developed your practice?
I think there’s just a textural, material frequency to painting that I always wanted to get close to. It’s one of the languages that feels most comfortable for me to use – even when I make other things, there nearly always seems to be a reason to think and feel through painting.
I love how slow oil paint is (even though I speed mine up a lot by decreasing its drying time). There’s so much room for making adjustments and changes before arriving at a finished painting. You can look for an image without knowing it ahead of encountering it.
Probably all my paintings respond to a single central theme but I have trouble saying what it is. It’s existential and easier for me to paint about than talk about. One important thing is just about painting as a language and the bodies on either side of an exchange that might happen through it.
What have been some of your favourite career experiences?
Participating in the DESA residency in Ubud, Bali, earlier this year was an amazing experience! It was my first residency so I didn’t have any solid expectations. It was beautiful and intense to have the luxury of so much open and focused time and then to get totally distracted. I think I’m still metabolising my experiences of that time and that’s exciting because it fuels further work. I don’t necessarily even know what that is yet. I enjoyed connecting with other artists there so much. Moments of connection or affinity with others are so sustaining in the course of a career or a stretch of life.
Every opportunity to engage with others in a space that is deeply meaningful for all present but doesn’t necessarily feel valuable in the wider world some days is always a great experience. So any contexts for those exchanges are my favourite career experiences. And the enduring relationships that are borne out of these are so important and so fun!
Could you tell us about the works featured in Painting Now?
I began where I always begin – with a group of reference images that I feel compelled to translate by painting. Some had been hanging around in the wings for a long time (to the point that I can no longer remember their source) and others popped up after the series had begun, inserting themselves into the logic of the group.
Some are screenshots from the Czech film Malá mořská víla (The Little Mermaid), 1976. All the paintings correspond to different screenshots and other found photographic images from magazines, memes, et cetera.
One morning out of nowhere, I realised they were paintings of people who wanted to touch something. I wonder if they’re uncomfortable but at the same time humorous in a way that alleviates the discomfort. (Although perhaps you would have to share my exact sense of humour – I’m never sure.) I think they’re uncomfortable because they hold a sense of ambivalence. Making these works, I thought a lot about ambivalence in desire and fantasy, and I never arrived at a concrete idea of what anyone wanted to touch. I wouldn’t say they’re related to my own experience but I do believe in a somatic relationship to any work I’m making.
Were there challenges that you were working through with these paintings and how were these resolved?
I think in a way every painting works through a technical challenge. There’s tension in terms of the relationship of the painting to the source image and what it owes to it in terms of fidelity. I have to discover as I go what part of the image it is that I’m painting – or to remember it. Because I’m not painting the photograph, I’m painting something beyond the image to which it refers. Or I’m painting something the image does.
I think this challenge might actually be technical and conceptual at the same time. Because it’s about processual choices and paint handling, but it’s also a question of why. Why am I painting this image? If I need to ask myself that, I think it means I’ve made some mistakes regarding fidelity to the image rather than fidelity to what’s beyond it that made me love that image in the first place and made it speak to me. And I have to take several steps back through the painting to correct it.
Is there a narrative running through your Painting Now series and how do this reflect the direction of your practice?
I really like the idea that every painting is made possible by the last. My hope is always that I continue to grow more articulate through every iteration because even if I’m not articulating something verbally, I care that some communicative channel for exchange is open through my paintings. I think the direction of my practice at this time is driven by a pursuit of greater economy, faith in the capacity of less to sometimes speak more, and by continuing to think about those challenges in painting I talked about earlier.
