Tim Maguire
Tim Maguire (b.1958) has been firmly established as one of the most important and original voices in Australian contemporary art for close to four decades. Across an internationally celebrated career that began in the early 1980s, his practice has consistently tested the boundaries between painting, printmaking and digital image-making, producing works of extraordinary impact, intensity and technical mastery.
Cinematic in scale and distinctive for their rich colouration and luminosity, Maguire’s paintings pull the viewer into a heightened field of looking – an effulgence of colour that may dissipate into pure sensation up close or cohere, at a distance, into impossible landscapes or hyper-floral tableaux. Working from fragmented or manipulated photographic source material, he has developed a singular approach informed by printmaking techniques, in which transparency, layering and lustre are central to an ongoing interrogation of surface, perception and the illusory alchemies of the painting process.
“The ideal painting for me is one where, up close, you see nothing but paint and process and layers, and then, from far enough away, the whole thing resolves into a convincing illusion,” says the artist, who was recognised nationally as a generational talent after being awarded the Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship in 1993. “Ideally, the viewer is like a rubber band – moving back and forth between those two states. For me, that tension is the magic of painting.”
Offering her own reflections on the magic of Maguire’s paintings in the foreword to the artist’s 2007 monograph (Piper Press), Cate Blanchett AC writes, “…the beguiling eroticism of a Maguire painting’s surface is magnetic, charged and compelling. Even Tim’s studies have a complete integrity to them – we observe their minutiae up close, but sense that their scope is vast and constantly evolving. Through micro-observations of these surfaces the viewer gains new perspective on the whole. The challenge Maguire poses us is to move beyond this classical enjoyment of the surface – the facade – and the perfection of the form.”
“Thirty years ago, I acquired my first Maguire painting on behalf of private clients, and I have continued to purchase his paintings and lightboxes every decade since,” writes Michael Reid OAM. “What drew me to Tim’s practice was his boundary-riding approach – beginning with digitally manipulated photographs and reconstructing them in oil through colour-separation layers. Step close and his paintings read as abstractions; step back and flowers, snowflakes or water resolve into luminous focus.”
Born in the United Kingdom and raised in Melbourne and the Blue Mountains, Maguire studied at East Sydney Technical College before receiving a scholarship to attend the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied under Jan Dibbets. Following the Moët & Chandon Fellowship, he spent a formative period working in Europe and has since lived and worked between Australia and Europe, now maintaining a studio in rural France. He has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally since the 1980s, including a major solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2008, and group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia (Earth Sea Sky, 2019), the Art Gallery of South Australia (Chromatopia, 2020), the National Gallery of Victoria (New Australian Printmaking, 2022) and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Wonderstruck, 2025). His work is held in important public and private collections in Australia and abroad, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
For all enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au
