{"id":37563,"date":"2026-02-01T23:08:43","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T12:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelreid.com.au\/?post_type=exhibition&p=37563"},"modified":"2026-03-11T10:59:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T23:59:08","slug":"tim-maguire-artist-profile","status":"publish","type":"exhibition","link":"https:\/\/michaelreid.com.au\/exhibition\/tim-maguire-artist-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist Profile \u2013 Tim Maguire"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n
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In the lead-up to the announcement of Tim Maguire<\/strong>\u2019s representation by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin, the gallery team sat down with the artist for a wide-ranging conversation exploring the ideas, processes and optical tensions that have shaped his internationally acclaimed practice across a career spanning close to four decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter how naturalistic a painting appears, it\u2019s still just a physical accumulation of paint on a surface \u2013 and yet we bring so much to it as viewers,\u201d says Maguire. \u201cI was always trying to make paintings where that tension becomes evident: where you think, \u2018This really is just a whole lot of gloopy paint,\u2019 and at the same time, from across the room, it looks like a photograph.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the full conversation below alongside a curated selection of recent paintings by the artist, newly available through Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin.<\/p>\n

For enquiries, please contact dean@michaelreid.com.au<\/a><\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s a play between the illusion<\/em> of the image and the physicality<\/em> of the paint. 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<\/em>.\u201d<\/h1>\n

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TIM MAGUIRE<\/h1>\n

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Your practice has encompassed various mediums across your career. How do you approach these distinct facets of your practice \u2013 painting, printmaking and photo-based work \u2013 and how has moving between different fields become embedded within your painting process and shaped your broader thinking about image-making?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m primarily known as a painter, but I see printmaking as being of equal importance in my practice. That\u2019s not necessarily represented in the way my work is seen, because there aren\u2019t necessarily the same opportunities to show the prints. But I do make a lot of prints, so it\u2019s an ongoing practice.<\/p>\n

It started in 1987, probably. I\u2019d already started exhibiting \u2013 my first solo show was in 84 \u2013 but it was a breakthrough moment. I found myself working with a master printer who explained that you could build up colour through discrete layers of primary colour \u2013 yellow, red, blue, black \u2013 and that you could get all the colours through those three or four colours. The idea of working with transparent inks on white paper, and allowing the whiteness of the paper to illuminate the image and create this sense of luminosity, was also a revelation. I made a few prints with the Australian Print Workshop, but I also took those printmaking ideas back into the studio.<\/p>\n

I was thinking, can I make paintings in the same way? That\u2019s when I started working with transparent colour \u2013 not so much in layers, but certainly using transparent colour and the whiteness of the canvas to illuminate. Thin glazes and transparent pigments came out of printmaking. I had this idea that if you could get everything in the right position and the right level of transparency and intensity, you could create an image that way.<\/p>\n

It was only some years later, when I stumbled across a process of splashing solvent into the colour layers to remove parts of each layer in a fairly random dot pattern, that I realised I could emulate the quality of pure points of colour sitting side by side. So that led to my colour separation paintings \u2013 which, of course, is a printmaking term.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n\t

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\n Tim Maguire <\/div>\n \n
\n Untitled 20210601<\/em>, 2021 <\/div>\n \n
\n 160 x 233 cm <\/div>\n \n
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Could you tell us about the colour-separation process \u2013 how has it developed across different bodies of work?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

When I got to the point where I realised I could actually do it, the splashing of the solvent was a key component and quite random. I wanted each layer of colour to remain visible as an independent entity \u2013 to reveal the process itself. It was about the idea that you could make an image by pulling it apart and putting it back together again.<\/p>\n

To do that, I needed to work quickly. It might be a four- or five-hour painting session, then splashing the solvent while the paint was still wet enough to react, but dry enough not to collapse into a mess. Timing was everything. I liked the idea that the image was brought together through a mechanical process largely determined by chance \u2013 how much solvent comes off the brush, how dry the paint is. The image comes together almost magically, which, for me, was one of the great attractions of printmaking.<\/p>\n

Later I realised \u2013 particularly after a series of massive paintings in 2000 \u2013 that this approach had limits. Those works were about two-and-a-half metres by six metres, and I ended up needing serious physiotherapy. So I slowed down. It wasn\u2019t essential to do everything in one session, and that allowed for more control. There\u2019s a desire to master the challenges you set for yourself, and eventually you do.<\/p>\n

In this process, any colour might be a combination of yellow, magenta and cyan. Gauging that while applying it is almost impossible. Often it\u2019s only when you apply the third colour that you realise you\u2019ve gone wrong with the first two. Those pitfalls are what keep it interesting. I\u2019ve got to the point now where I\u2019m pretty good at navigating them, so maybe it\u2019s time to do something else. \u00a0The last two shows I did were very ambitious, large diptychs. I could never have done those 25 years ago. It felt like the end of something.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n

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You spoke about holding the image in a state of becoming \u2013 the work being less about representation and more about \u2018imageness\u2019 in a slightly dispassionate way.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

For sure. It was coming out of postmodernism, and the idea that images were floating around \u2013 you could grab one from here, one from there \u2013 like slides on a screen, which is how we learned about art back then.<\/p>\n

I was trying to make paintings that looked like that. They were flat, transparent, with no tactile physicality. The paint was a very thin veil \u2013 almost like a luminous projected image, closer to a cinema screen than a physical object. The images could be anything. The weirder the colour combinations, the better. I moved between representational and abstract things, and the common denominator was process.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n\t

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\n Untitled 20230201<\/em>, 2023 <\/div>\n \n
\n 212 x 404 cm (diptych) <\/div>\n \n
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There is a physicality to the way your paintings are experienced \u2013 both in their monumental scale and in the way a picture might cohere at a distance or dissolve into abstraction up close. How do you consider scale in the making of a work?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That transformation is really important. I always thought the great thing about large-scale works was that you could be incredibly loose at the coalface, and yet, if the viewer stepped back far enough, the image could come together.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s this play between the illusion of the image and the physicality of the paint. The ideal painting for me is one where, up close, you can\u2019t see anything but paint and process and layers, and then from far enough away the whole thing resolves into a convincing illusion of something.<\/p>\n

Ideally, the viewer is pulled towards the surface and back to the whole image \u2013 they\u2019re moved back and forth, and you get that tension between the two states as extreme as possible. Like pulling on a rubber band. For me, that\u2019s the magic of painting. No matter how naturalistic or detailed a painting is, it\u2019s just a physical accumulation of paint on a surface. And yet we have this capacity as viewers to read things into it.<\/p>\n

So I was always trying to make paintings where that became evident. Where you think, \u201cOh, this really is just a whole lot of gloopy paint,\u201d and at the same time, from across the room, it looks like a photograph.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n\t

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\n Untitled 20020503<\/em>, 2002 <\/div>\n \n
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\n Untitled 20220303<\/em>, 2022 <\/div>\n \n
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That sense of scale \u2013 of cropping and extrapolating source imagery into something cinematic \u2013 also transforms the subject. How do you think about beauty in your work, particularly when it\u2019s pushed to extremes?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s tricky, because even to say your own paintings are beautiful sounds vain or arrogant. And for a long time there was an idea that aspiring to beauty was philosophically flawed \u2013 and it smacked of elitism or privilege. So it\u2019s hard not to have an ambivalent relationship with it.<\/p>\n

But if I look across my work, the aesthetic quality has always been a strong driver. The challenge is to create an image that holds your gaze, invites you in, and encourages you to look long enough for the image to start working on you. You begin to see it differently.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve all had that experience where you hear a song for the first time and it sounds like nothing, and by the fiftieth time you love it. That\u2019s hard to achieve with painting; we\u2019re less and less trained to spend time with an image now. So making something beautiful can be a way of slowing down the viewing process. It\u2019s not the end goal, but there\u2019s something that holds my attention \u2013 often something I can\u2019t quite articulate. A particular colour combination, a tonal shift, or an awkwardness that keeps you oscillating between irreconcilable positions.<\/p>\n

Flowers were annoying in that sense, because everyone assumes flowers are beautiful. It made it harder. I wasn\u2019t that interested in prettiness. What interested me was the tradition \u2013 the philosophy behind Dutch still lifes, mortality, fleetingness. Another attraction was that you could zoom into a flower and find forms that were almost abstract \u2013 curves and dramas you couldn\u2019t find in a portrait or a landscape. They had no top or bottom. They had the vigour and thrust of something like a Delacroix \u2013 movement, writhing energy. That\u2019s what I was finding in those early works. Yes, they were flowers, but that wasn\u2019t really the point.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really think about beauty per se. I see something in the world and think, I\u2019d like to photograph that. Then I see something in the photograph that makes me think I could paint that. Often what you get is nothing. Sometimes you get something vaguely like what you expected and it\u2019s not interesting. Sometimes you get something completely unexpected because something else happened along the way. That can set up a whole new series.<\/p>\n

One of the big things in my work is the relationship between the abstract and the illusionistic. Monet\u2019s water lilies are a good example. They\u2019re almost abstract expressionist, but there\u2019s a sense of space that\u2019s both perspectival and flat. The water surface is frontal, but the space recedes. You never see the horizon.<\/p>\n

That contradiction is what painting is. You look at a painting of a landscape and read it as space, but it\u2019s flat in front of you. That\u2019s titillating for the brain \u2013 two contradictory things at once. It\u2019s like life. There\u2019s no logic to it.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n

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Your career has unfolded alongside a broader shift from analogue to digital. How has that transition influenced your thinking about images and surfaces?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Even early on, if I was taking a detail from a Dutch still life, it was already an image that had passed through multiple stages. By the time I found it, the painting was 300 years old. It had been photographed, reproduced in a book, sat around for decades, then scanned \u2013 and from that fragment I was making this huge painting.<\/p>\n

The idea of moving from analogue to digital and back to analogue \u2013 the oil painting \u2013 felt very comfortable. The same applied to photographing, manipulating images digitally, printing them out, then using them as the basis for paintings or lightboxes.<\/p>\n

If I used the same image three times and painted it three times as colour separations, they would all end up looking different. No matter how good I got, I could do it for 100 years and be unable to make two the same. So this idea that everything is full of possibilities, everything is changing, there are no constants \u2013 that\u2019s probably one of the themes behind the work.<\/p>\n

Around that time, digital photography was emerging. I went to New York and came back with a Kodak digital camera. Because it was digital, I could take a thousand photos and find something later, put it on the screen, and it was incredibly luminescent \u2013 unlike images in books.<\/p>\n

Early digital images had strange effects \u2013 weird colour fringes around forms \u2013 which I found fascinating. Everything was super low-grade, with weird glitches and strange colours. I saw the painterly potential in that. The question became how to do that in painting. That\u2019s where colour separation came in.<\/p>\n

It creates a glowing quality. With opaque paint, light bounces off the surface. With transparent pigment, light passes through, hits the white canvas, and comes back out \u2013 like stained glass. Everything becomes more glowy, more otherworldly.<\/p>\n

So it might look like a painting of a flower, but really it\u2019s a painting of a photograph of a flower. There was always a distance between me and the so-called subject.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n

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With recent series such as <\/strong><\/em>Small Worlds<\/strong>\u00a0and <\/strong><\/em>Lost and Found<\/strong>, you returned to Dutch floral still lifes as source material. What prompted that return?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

That was partly about accessibility. In the early 1990s, I was working from postcards or the occasional book. Now museums have incredibly high-resolution images you can zoom into endlessly. Suddenly there was all this material available, and I had the technical capacity to deal with it.<\/p>\n

It rekindled my interest in the subject matter. Earlier, I liked the fuzzy old postcard because it was often unclear what I was actually painting. I didn\u2019t know if it was a leaf or background, and I liked not knowing. It freed me up. It was just shapes and marks. Now it\u2019s very clear what it is, and I\u2019m interested in it. I really enjoyed painting the little bugs and strange minute details that had been scrupulously recorded 400 years ago.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n\t

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\n Untitled 20240301<\/em>, 2024 <\/div>\n \n
\n 174 x 180 cm <\/div>\n \n
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These series seem to involve a more explicit engagement with the symbolic or allegorical aspects of Dutch still-life tradition. Do you feel there was a shift? And what felt newly available to you in drawing out those narrative layers?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s maturity, but I stopped denying the source. For a long time I talked about the work as being about process. Now the process is a given.<\/p>\n

There had been terrible bushfires just prior, and that was all happening around the time of COVID; this idea that tiny viral agents could turn everything on its head. Bushfires have been a theme in my work for a long time. They\u2019re illustrations of the fleeting, unreliable nature of existence.<\/p>\n

Beauty is subject to those forces. Nothing is timeless or universal. There\u2019s a resonance between those ideas and what underpinned Dutch still lifes originally. So I was happy to re-dock my boat there, with more attention.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n

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This openness to narrative feels especially present in bodies of work such as <\/em>Old World, New World and <\/em>Regeneration, which responded to the Kinglake bushfires. How did those works take shape?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bushfires had been part of my thinking since art school. I grew up in the Blue Mountains \u2013 they were an ever-present danger. You felt safe, but the wilderness was always there. I made early works about that contrast \u2013 everyday life set against an underlying threat. A barbecue in an empty space, sausages frying, bushfire smoke on the horizon.<\/p>\n

After the Kinglake fires, I took panoramas of the burnt landscape. The twisted branches looked almost nuclear, but in the foreground there was vivid green regrowth. That energy of renewal after such ferocity was incredibly striking. That became the source material for the Kinglake works images \u2013 mainly large prints and light boxes, though I\u2019ve also made some paintings from it.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n

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\n Untitled 20081005<\/em>, 2008\/25 <\/div>\n \n
\n 145 x 250 cm <\/div>\n \n
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The Kinglake works introduce elements such as falling ash, which, like the cascading snow in your wintry paintings, bring another optical layer to the image. How do these motifs operate for you?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

It was an extension of my fascination with the luminous quality of the digital screen. I was making images on screen, printing them large, but there\u2019s always some loss. Printing onto backlit screens maximised that luminosity.<\/p>\n

More recently, I revisited canvases of falling snow. I superimposed imagery from the Kinglake photographs \u2013 trees and branches \u2013 in a way that integrated the snowflakes into the space. The juxtaposition of burnt bush and snow gave the works a strange quality. In paintings where I\u2019d used colour separation, the red, green, and blue snowflakes looked like flying embers or spirits \u2013 something ghostly or magical. They refract light, almost like prisms, and can act like little lenses that reveal the forms behind them.<\/p>\n

There are certain elements that recur in your work \u2013 falling snow, water lilies, berries \u2013 what draws you back to these motifs and what do they allow you to explore pictorially?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was interested in how the water lilies could be three-dimensional and very flat at the same time. With falling snow, it\u2019s the fleeting beauty, the randomness of distribution. Which snowflakes do you include, which do you leave out? I never put anything in that wasn\u2019t there, so it\u2019s a question of what you exclude. It\u2019s a bit like automatic writing.<\/p>\n

More recently, some very early imagery has reappeared \u2013 tanks with strips of light between them. Before tanks, I was painting columns \u2013 symbols of rationalisation. Then those dissolved into strips of light. Putting illusion back in: light, form, space. The horizon appears, too \u2013 very reductive, barely a space, but recognisable. There are lots of references to abstract painting \u2013 readable both as abstraction and as something seen in the world. I\u2019ve gone back to some of that imagery in recent prints: the horizon, the square, the openings.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n\t

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\n Untitled 20240102<\/em>, 2024 <\/div>\n \n
\n 150 x 150 cm <\/div>\n \n
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You divide your time between rural France and Australia. How does that movement shape the work?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

People in Australia say my work feels European, and people in Europe say it feels Australian. So I\u2019m somewhere in between. I might work on a painting in one studio and finish it in the other, and it looks completely different. The light does have an effect \u2013 you see things differently. You adjust, you accommodate.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve never really consciously thought, \u201cThat\u2019s a European thing, that\u2019s an Australian thing.\u201d The gestation period is so long that when I\u2019m in France, I\u2019m probably working on ideas that I came up with in Australia, or even on the previous trip to Australia, and vice versa. Everything gets mixed together.<\/p>\n

Images float around on my computer for years, get recycled, accumulate. They\u2019re just ingredients. They become disassociated from their origins. With the Dutch still-life material, people ask, \u201cWhat painting is that from?\u201d I have absolutely no idea.<\/p>\n

In addition returning to historical source material, you have also revisited and reworked your own earlier paintings. How do you approach that and what does it unlock for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s partly age. Things come around again. When I was younger, I moved fast, trying to get somewhere. Interesting ideas get set aside, not fully explored. So I\u2019ve given myself permission to go back and dig around. Why not? There might be more there. You also accumulate unfinished works. You ask: Is it finished? Do I sign it? Do I throw it away? Or can I do something else with it? That\u2019s been happening \u2013 adding trees to falling snow, for instance \u2013 and it\u2019s meshing nicely with what I\u2019m doing now.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n

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Could you tell us about what you’re working on and what feels most generative in the studio at the moment? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m still working with colour separation, but the very large figurative Dutch master imagery has become less central. There\u2019s a body of work that began with digital prints. I used dice to determine which drawing was used for which colour, orientation, positive or negative. With those works, it\u2019s about randomness \u2013 letting go of control.<\/p>\n

It takes me back to printmaking, back to the press, back to ink. You try to make one image and end up with twenty variations. The variations become the interesting thing.
\nI\u2019m also working on very simple little landscapes. Change the amount of yellow, change the sky \u2013 you could make a thousand and they\u2019d all be different. The base forms feel universal. Like Sugimoto\u2019s horizons \u2013 images we feel we\u2019ve always known.
\nI enjoy that fulcrum between abstraction and representation \u2013 between chance and recognition. I don\u2019t quite know how it works, but it does.<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n <\/div> \r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\n\n\n

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