APRIL 15 - MAY 31, 2016
Join us for an exhibition of works by Gareth Maguire, featuring a suite of lithographs and a suite of monotypes created at Flatbed.
'Willie' is Gareth Maguire's first lithograph, printed in an Edition Variée. It features a portrait of Willie Nelson drawn in a loose and perhaps violently emotional manner, a style of rendering and mark making consistent throughout Maguire’s work. The portrait is punctuated and surrounded by words and phrases - some are quotes from Nelson, others are distortions of his quotes or lyrics. The entire Edition Variée will be on view and like much of Maguire's work, it is bold in color and rich in symbolism. Some portraits are surrounded with roughly painted or hand rolled versions of the Texas Flag, while others have symbolic drawings of the heart and lungs or images of Willie's beloved guitar ‘Trigger'.
Maguire employees this same symbolically important and textually rich imagery in the suite of four monotypes. He says, “I write the text down as it jumps out at me. Some times it will be a line from a song playing in the background, some times it will be something one of my daughters had just said to me, and other times it may be as simple as something I overheard the print maker saying to her apprentice. The text can be poetic or it can appear to be little other than nonsensical ramblings.”
Gareth Maguire is an Irish artist living and working in Austin, Texas. He works primarily in neo-expressionist, graffiti-style painting. Gareth's art focuses on suggestive dichotomies such as freedom versus occupation, sovereignty versus subservience, war versus peace, love versus hate, Catholicism versus Protestantism and religion versus irreligion. Balancing abstraction with figuration, his social commentary is at times simple and humorous and other times insightful and provocative.
He mixes stainless steel with canvas, steel bars with wood and applies oil bar, acrylic and spray paint to just about any useable surface. His paintings are punctuated by doodles and phrases from his daughters, along with images and poetry from many of his favorite painters and writers. His life in Northern Ireland, England, France, New York, Los Angeles and Texas has given him a perspective rendered in contradictions—colorful yet blacker than black, unique yet familiar, a unification of the obscure and the obvious