Brian Maguire: Remains
Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
17 September 2021 - 9 January 2022
Arizona 2, 2020
Acrylic on linen, 150 x 200 cm
Photo courtesy of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
© Brian Maguire
Crawford Art Gallery presents Remains, a series of large scale artworks by BRIAN MAGUIRE. The exhibition depicts the lives lost crossing the border to the US.
Artist Brian Maguire, known for his expressionist paintings addressing issues of social injustice, continues his creative enquiry into the Mexican/American border. In 2019, Brian Maguire visited Dr Greg Hess, Chief Medical Examiner for Pima County, Tucson, Arizona. Dr Hess gave the artist access to some thousand visual records of migrant lives lost in the crossing from South and Central America and Mexico, into the United States. Having combed through these records, Brian Maguire began a new series of paintings, acknowledging the many unidentified victims who undertook this perilous journey to the United States.
Curator Anne Boddaert says ‘When Brian shared his work with us, here in the Crawford Art Gallery, we were upended, we looked and simply could not look away. His works compels the audience to linger on issues of migration and global unrest‘. Anne Boddaert went on to say “Despite the challenging subject matter, visitors will be drawn to Brian’s expressionist style beautifully executed in these expansive paintings. This exhibition will showcase the artist’s poised technique and how he utilises open and rough brushstrokes to represent the harsh landscape of South and Central America and Mexico’ .
In late 2020, the Crawford Art Gallery secured the painting Arizona 3 for the national collection. This acquisition opened up a conversation with Brian Maguire about a showing of this emerging body of work, some of his most nuanced and ambitious to date.
Remains
Exhibition Catalogue
A catalogue with full colour illustrations and texts by Dr Greg Hess, Christian Viveros-Fauné and Edward Vulliamy accompanies the exhibition.
BRIAN MAGUIRE
Irish painter Brian Maguire studied at Dun Laoghaire School of Art and the National College of Art and Design. He has worked with marginalised groups in institutions in Ireland, Poland and the US. Maguire represented Ireland at the São Paolo Biennale in 1998. He was appointed Professor of the Fine Art Faculty of the National College of Art and Design in 2000 and is an elected member of Aosdána. Brian Maguire has shown extensively in Europe and the US, most recently at the Museo De Arte de Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and the Rubin Centre, Texas University at El Paso, Texas (September 2019), at the United Nations Headquarters, New York, (in 2020), the Rhona Hoffmann Gallery, Chicago, (January 2021), and Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris (March 2021).
CRAWFORD ART GALLERY
Emmet Place, Cork, Ireland
