Over the course of two years at the Flatbed studio Gareth Maguire has created an expressive array of monotypes and monoprints. Steeped in his stream of consciousness approach to image making, each piece is a map of the moods, the music and the surroundings that Maguire found inside and outside the studio. This immediate and impassioned approach to image making imbues his prints with a heartbeat one can both see and feel throughout his body of work.
Maguire’s prints are created with multiple layers ink from painted and stenciled images applied to a sheet of acrylic Plexiglas. When rolled through the printing press the imagery transfers from the acrylic sheet to the paper and then the process beings again with additional layers added to the paper until the image is deemed complete by the artist. In some cases, Maguire uses images drawn and printed from a lithographic stone to add another layer of content. This layering process may be long and also fraught with struggle and frustrating imperfection. Maguire speaks of this process and the necessity to re-work an image to completion; “When I’ve worked and reworked an image multiple times and I still simply can’t stomach it to the point I literally want to burn it, I usually walk away for a while. And invariably when I give the art time to rest and myself time to breathe, when I’m reunited with the piece the appropriate way for me to complete it will reveal itself to me.” Maguire’s work that results from this creative tug of war is richly punctuated with symbols and text that reads in a visually poetic way. 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 printmaker saying to her apprentice. The text can be poetic or it can appear to be little other than nonsensical ramblings.”
Join us the evening of October 20, from 5 - 8pm, to enjoy the culmination of Gareth Maguire’s last two years at Flatbed Press.
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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.