Fintan Magee was born in 1985 in Lismore, New South Wales. Raised by an English mother and an Irish father who met at art school and both had creative careers, it seemed very natural for Magee to start drawing and experimenting with graffiti from a young age. Magee grew up in Brisbane in a neighborhood where graffiti was a natural part of being a teenager in high school. At the same time, it was a working-class neighborhood from which the social consciousness found in his work grew.
Magee puts it like this: “Looking back, I realized that, in particular, the big art institutions and artists themselves weren’t really connecting with working people. When I started painting murals, I saw that as an opportunity to just reconnect with people who don’t have “capital A” art as part of their daily lives in a way that feels natural. I feel like that disconnection is kind of intentional, particularly in Australia and Britain, and reinforces the class system.” Drawing from personal experience and the mundane, his figurative paintings are deeply integrated with the urban environment and exude an inherent sentimentality and softness.
In a time marked by lockdowns and restrictions with no opportunity to travel abroad or photograph models for narrative pieces, the works his ‘Days grow longer’ solo show have emerged in a period where the artist has been able to concentrate exclusively on painting, diving even further into the many opportunities of expression through the canvas. This has resulted in a series of very intense works.
Magee began to search for inspiration and references in the world around him, his studio. A pot plant became his subject, and remaining true to his methodology, it was photographed, becoming the ‘still life’ of his daily ritualistic act to create one work each day. The shift in focus to the physical act of painting over concept development lead Magee to begin to make sense of the state of chaos and isolation that he and the world were experiencing. During the same period, ‘The Elevator’ came to life, which again draws on experience of isolation in an urban setting. Illustrating a figure in a public housing elevator, the piece explores themes surrounding poverty, confinement and mental health.
With the high degree of social reference in the upcoming show from this period, the symbolism also became very clear in a new imagery of figures depicted behind glass. Magee describes it like this: “These works depict working people behind glass. The Arctic glass pattern used in the painting was common in middle-class Queensland homes in the 1960s and was used in French doors and windows. Some of my earliest memories of Queensland architecture was my father’s silhouette through the glass doors when he got home. The work explores the role of de-industrialization in urban communities and on the suburban fringes of Australia. The figures in the mural appear distant, disconnected, isolated, and breaking up. As middle-class homes become increasingly out of reach for working-class Australians and lower-pay and job insecurity continues to shape how we work, these paintings explore how nostalgia shapes political views, and how workers view their communities and the outside world.”
Fintan Magee has truly reached out of the ordinary to create this phenomenal new solo show.
Fintan Magee: website | facebook | instagram
KIRK Gallery: website | facebook | instagram
