Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce its third exhibition of new paintings by Australian artist Tim Maguire.

In this latest body of work, Maguire continues his practice of combining digital image-making techniques with a painterly process to create large-scale oil paintings. Some of Maguire’s subject matter remains familiar—tight angles of poppies, stems and brilliantly blue sky—as does his technique, using a three-color separation of a single photograph to create his cropped floral paintings.

The rest of the work is a departure from the plant life. Lush, thriving gardens are replaced by winter cityscapes of falling snow. Yet Maguire does not record this mundane imagery as it appears to the naked eye. Instead, the artist builds upon his original process, by introducing elements of refracted light and chance using three photographs, each shot a second apart and then realigned. Any moving elements, such as snowflakes, become pure, refracted color, much the same way as light moves through a prism. Maguire then paints the scene, including these newly reconfigured, candy-colored snowflakes, looking like so many spilled gumdrops falling from the sky.

The artist employs his signature method of applying successive layers of paint to the canvas. Maguire mirrors the basic printing process, using only cyan, magenta and yellow, while splashing solvent along the way to reveal the underlying layers. The smooth surface of the finished works creates a physical relationship with the viewer, forcing one to step away from the painting, then back again. From afar, these large-scale paintings almost look like mechanically reproduced photographs, yet upon closer inspection the images become abstract, more about Maguire’s shapes, color and process than the subject matter at hand.

Tim Maguire has exhibited extensively in Europe and Australia for more than two decades, including a 2008 solo show at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, UK. His work is held by virtually every Australian museum and is included in major public and private collections throughout Europe. The artist lives and works in London.