PRESENTATION: Brian Maguire-La Grande Illusio

Brian Maguire’s painting practice is driven by the struggle against inequality and violence, and the pursuit of justice. Compelled towards the raw realities of human conflict, Maguire approaches painting foremost as an act of solidarity, rehumanising his subjects and recentring the narratives of the disenfranchised. Social engagement plays a central role, leading him to work closely and interactively with refugees, survivors of warzones, incarcerated peoples, and local newsrooms in locations including Sudan, Syria, São Paulo and Ciudad Juárez.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo:Kerlin Gallery Archive

Brian Maguire’s aesthetic sensibility and practice can be traced back to his involvement in the struggle for social justice during the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Born a decade or more after the German Neo-Expressionists, Maguire’s peers include Martin Kippenberger and Francesco Clemente, but his kinship with Marlene Dumas is most pronounced, in their outrage at moral hypocrisy and their concerns with both social justice and violence against the body. Brian Maguire’s subject-led approach requires negotiating an exchange, establishing a method of working that attempts to “repay the debt” to its subjects. Maguire’s direct observation of conflict zones puts his practice adjacent to forms of war reporting or photojournalism, but while his artworks might begin as acts of bearing witness, his task in the studio is to transform his testimony into blisteringly powerful works of art. There is a resulting tension between the raw and visceral nature of Maguire’s subject matter and the seductive, illusory nature of painting itself. Rather than abandoning aestheticism, Maguire uses painterly skill, surface and texture to draw us into an uncomfortable relationship in which ethical vision functions as part of the poetic imagination, resituating art in the concrete social structures from which it is so often removed. Entitled “La Grande Illusion” the exhibition is structured and distilled in ways that reveal how the artist has represented the fragility of human rights and how he has persistently responded to societal injustices and their legacies. Focusing on a period of intense productivity for the artist, 2007–2024, it appraises his activism in human rights and his efforts to document the shape-shifting nature of war with its far-reaching impact on the poor and our environment. Maguire presents an expanded view of war- seen as a constant cycle of corrupted power and death – it encompasses capital, class, gender, and post-colonial legacies. Intimate and uncompromising, his paintings form a demand for social justice and are an act of solidarity with families and communities. These include paintings from projects in Juárez, Mexico (2012–15), the Mediterranean (2016), Aleppo (2017), South Sudan (2018), the Amazon (2022), Arizona (2022) and Brazil (2022-23) Testimony is integral to understanding violence, human rights violations and state abuse. In turning towards the plight of those erased by media or state institutions, the artist reminds us why painting matters. “In painting, ‘the invisible becomes visible’, he explains. It is a transformative frame, placing the experiences you encounter on the doorstep of power and in a continuum with history, mythology and the tragedies of existence.” Like education for Paulo Freire, art for Maguire is a radical process of passion and indignation, which carries the potential of alternative futures. “the image carries the present, the medium carries the hope” says Maguire and expands by referring to the domains of loss as ‘the perpetrators of the injustice are worldwide and singular and that’s what makes the stories the same’. Since 2010, Maguire has worked regularly in the Mexican city of Juárez (the murder capital of the world) where more than 5,000 people have been butchered by drug cartels over the past six years. The exhibition includes paintings completed between 2012 and 2014 that address the Mexican drug war. For Maguire, painting is an act of solidarity with the forgotten and voiceless. His figurative paintings and portraits confound tradition by using the authority of the genre to bring dignity to the overlooked and marginalized. These are some of Maguire’s largest and most nuanced paintings to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas. He works slowly, using photographic sources, searching for that point where illustration ceases and art begins. In April 2022, Brian Maguire travelled to Brazil to investigate what war reporter Ed Vuillamy has described as “the war on the world” – the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Visiting remote villages on the Abacaxis River by boat, the artist was able to witness first-hand the effects of deforestation and persistent neglect of its indigenous inhabitants. Meeting with local leaders and communities via listening sessions, Maguire learned about the issues facing the Maraguá people, including healthcare, education, the impact of mining companies on fishing grounds.  From these stories, so often excluded from the dominant narrative, Maguire has devised a series of new large-scale paintings drawing attention to the urgent social and ecological crisis unfolding in the Amazon. Maguire shows us the beauty of the rainforest in its natural state, the horror of its destruction, and the socio-economic impact of land clearance. It also looks towards Brazil’s recent election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who has pledged to protect the Amazon and its indigenous population – as a ray of hope in addressing the crisis. Beginning his works as acts of documentation, Maguire then uses painterly skill, surface and texture to transform these testimonies into blisteringly powerful works of art, restoring an ethical vision to the poetic imagination.

Photo: Brian Maguire, Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up, 2016, acrylic on linen, 290 x 270 cm / 114.2 x 106.3 in, Collection of The Tia Collection, Santa Fe, © Brian Maguire, Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Info: Curators: Michael Dempsey and Barbara Dawson, Hugh Lane Gallery, Charlemont House, Parnell Square North, Dublin, Ireland, Duration: 3/102423/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 9:45-18:00, Fri 9:45-17:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, sun 11:00-17:00, https://hughlane.ie/