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Details
- Place where the work was made
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Australia
- Date
- 1990
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 199.5 x 367.0 cm stretcher
- Signature & date
Not signed. Not dated.
- Credit
- Anonymous gift 2012. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 133.2012
- Copyright
- © Tim Maguire
- Sir John Sulman Prize
- - 1991/92
- Artist information
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Tim Maguire
Works in the collection
- Share
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About
In Tim Maguire's tank paintings the artist comes to terms with both abstraction and the Australian landscape. The earliest tank paintings date from 1986 and are a more literal close view of a corrugated iron tank filling most of the painting, but with landscape showing at the top, bottom and sides of the tank. For Maguire they were a way to locate your self in the landscape and to depict an Australian subject matter and yet to break away from both the established traditions and modernist innovations dominating landscape painting in Australia. The tank in these works is a simplified and yet quite surreal form, a vernacular object depicted with the scale and presence of a history painting and the expected importance of subject matter this implies. Rather than a homage to the tank, the reduced and dominant form seems eerie and unexplained.
When Maguire returned to painting tanks in 1990 the tanks themselves expanded to fill the canvas, with the only other visible element being that light that shines from behind through the gaps between the tanks. These paintings are highly abstracted, retaining a minimum of representation in the curve of the tanks and the corrugations of the iron. The white light that divides the canvas into three sections recalls the light of Barnett Newman's zip paintings, undoubtedly an intentional reference in these works and the subsequent canal paintings series. Maguire pulls back from the complete abstraction of Newman - Newman's contrasting coloured lines or zips on another field of colour become here the bright line of the Australian light both defining and abstracting these vernacular forms.
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Places
Where the work was made
Australia
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Exhibition history
Shown in 2 exhibitions
Tim Maguire: Paintings and works on paper, Deutscher Brunswick Street Galleries, Fitzroy, 1990 -
The 1991-1992 Archibald, Wynne and Sulman (sur)Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Feb 1992–22 Apr 1992
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Bibliography
Referenced in 3 publications
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Art Gallery of New South Wales (Editor), Archibald, Wynne Prize and Sulman prize (1991/1992), Sydney, 1992. cat.no. 87
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Edward Colless, Tim Maguire: 1989-1990, Melbourne, 1990, viii, ix (colour illus.). plate no. 2; not paginated
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Laura Murray Cree (Editor), Tim Maguire, ‘What is it ‘as it really is’ ? Tim Maguire in conversation with Jonathon Watkins', pg. 36-136, 2007, 64-65 (colour illus.), 66.
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