BRIAN MAGUIRE
2016-07-04Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s preoccupations draw him to the margins of the art world—alternative space, prisons, women’s shelters, and psychiatric institutions—making shows in traditional gallery and museum spaces something of a rarity.
The title of this new body of work, Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, is taken from Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man, in turn is quoting Dante’s Inferno. In these paintings, Maguire directly confronts issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. This kind of work is difficult to accomplish, since narrators of stories of this kind, if they care, have a fear of exploiting grief as they walk the high wire between narrative and voyeurism. With Maguire, however, manipulation is entirely absent from the telling and painting, per se, is to the fore.
Opposite – Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, 2016
Exhibition runs through till August 20th, 2016
Kerlin Gallery
Anne’s Lane
South Anne Street
Dublin 2 Dublin
Ireland
