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Born in Chertsey, UK in 1958, Tim Maguire immigrated to Australia with his family in 1959. Growing up in Melbourne, Maguire’s artistic calling was deeply imprinted by formative experiences and a relentless, sometimes turbulent journey into creative self-discovery. As a young man, Maguire’s path was changed irrevocably by a serious train accident that interrupted his plans and forced a period of reflection and delayed study. When he returned to education, he delved into art history at the University of Sydney but found himself drawn more intensely toward the studio than the seminar room.
Early in the 1980s, Maguire trained at the National Art School (East Sydney Technical College), before continuing post-graduate studies at the City Art Institute and Sydney College of the Arts. A scholarship led Maguire to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, where he studied under the renowned Dutch photographer Jan Dibbets, absorbing key lessons in colour, process, and abstraction. These academic foundations, combined with formative travels through Europe and America, shaped his mature style—a unique fusion of painterly craft, digital process, and historical reference.
Artistic Development and Style Maguire emerged in the Australian art scene during the 1980s. His early work explored abstraction and the manipulation of light and colour, reflecting influences such as the American Hudson River School and European modernists like Blinky Palermo and Henri Fantin-Latour. By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Maguire had begun the series for which he is best known—cinematic floral and fruit still lifes. These large-scale paintings, often cropped like film stills, evoke 17th-century Flemish vanitas: romantic, lush, and meditative on the fragility and beauty of living things.
His practice is remarkably process-driven. Maguire’s technical innovations include a unique colour separation painting method, inspired by commercial printmaking: working in successive transparent layers of yellow, cyan, and magenta, he manipulates the drying process, flicking solvent and scraping back paint to reveal underlying forms and traces of the painter's hand. These techniques, while echoing the photographic, paradoxically highlight the materiality and temporal tension inherent in painting—each piece a battle with time, chance, and touch.
In more recent years, Maguire’s approach has expanded to embrace digital photography and direct printing, blurring boundaries between the digital and the hand-made. His pictures magnify flowers, fruit, and water—subjects through which he investigates life cycles, transience, and renewal.
Exhibition Career Maguire is one of Australia’s most successful and internationally recognized contemporary artists, exhibiting extensively throughout Australia and Europe since 1983. Key career milestones include:
Moët and Chandon Fellowship (1993): Won this prestigious award, leading to a decade based in France and further European acclaim.
Solo Exhibitions:
Group and Special Exhibitions:
His works feature prominently in major Australian and international invitational shows and art fairs.
Art Nomad is pleased to offer the following painting for sale:
"Melon" (1986) The artwork Melon (1986), oil on canvas, 56 x 76cm, exemplifies Maguire’s early exploration of fruit as motif—the forerunner of his acclaimed floral and fruit still lifes. Painted at a time when Maguire was consolidating his ideas in Sydney and just before his relocation to Katoomba, this painting embodies the vanitas theme: it is both luminous and poignant, inviting the viewer to meditate on nature’s bounty and ephemerality. The cropping, the richness of colour, and the attention to surface foreground a fascination with time and the fleeting beauty of organic forms.
Melon anticipates the lush romanticism and technical finesse that define Maguire’s later large-scale works. Here, one notes the subtle interplay of painterly technique—transparent layers, delicate modulations of colour, atmospheric background—that would soon evolve with the introduction of colour separation processes and digital references in his later oeuvre. In the context of your gallery, this artwork offers collectors not only a beautiful image but also a quintessential moment from Maguire’s formative years, capturing the nascent spirit of his internationally recognized practice.
"Melon" is much more than a straightforward still life—it is a meditation on the theme of vanitas, a reminder of nature’s cycles and the transience of sensory pleasure. The painting cultivates a dialogue between tradition and innovation, echoing seventeenth-century Flemish still lifes while foreshadowing Maguire’s engagement with process, abstraction, and the contemporary lens. The work’s sumptuous yet subtle surface holds painterly traces that resist photographic perfection—inviting viewers ever closer to discover the human hand behind it.
Major Gallery Collections Featuring Tim Maguire:
Numerous private and corporate collections across Australia, Europe, and the UK
Tim Maguire’s career is a testament to artistic innovation and an enduring meditation on life, beauty, and time—his paintings coveted by collectors and institutions globally.
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