Wonderful Things is an exhibition of new work by Tim McMonagle who through whimsical compositions, has considered the curious lifecycle of Australia's majestic native gums, magnificent pavlovas and the personalities of the duck-billed platypus.
Concurrent to his propensity for quirky imagery is a deep and abiding respect for the act of painting. Each canvas is a testament to his commitment to technique and mark making, and the enjoyment he gets from pushing around paint while lost in the creative process. Though an important element of his work, his subject matter becomes less about conveying sentiment than it is a device for capturing attention and luring his audience in. Doggedly devoted to his artistic practice, he rehearses each piece by drawing his ideas multiple times so as to become intimately acquainted with every line. By the time he is ready to commit to the canvas, he knows the image well enough that he is able to make his brushstrokes appear spontaneous. Seen up close, each fragment of the whole could potentially be observed as its own abstracted composition, such is the detail of his work.
Born in New Zealand, Tim McMonagle has spent the majority of his life working and studying in Melbourne. Winner of the 2010 Fletcher Jones Art Prize for his work The happy song, he was named a finalist in the 2012 Archibald Prize for his portrait of art collector Michael Buxton, and has been amongst the Wynne Prize finalists in 2018, 2016 and 2015 for his series of tree landscapes. A veteran of over forty solo and group exhibitions, his work is held in major public, private and university collections throughout Australia.
There is something eerily familiar about the trees that have begun to sprout up in Tim McMonagle’s work in recent times. An artist who has spent almost two decades disseminating human nature’s foibles and absurdities through his whimsical compositions, McMonagle has increasingly found himself compelled to consider the curious lifecycle of our majestic native gums. Already rich with folkloric, religious, and cultural symbolism, trees take on even greater significance in a country such as Australia, where the bush and outback landscapes are so closely intertwined with our national identity. Endlessly diverse in form, character and colour, their broken limbs and struggle for new growth provide McMonagle with the ideal allegory from which to contemplate the complexities of humanity and our connection to environment. Knotted, gnarled, and rather like a surreal Australian version of Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, they dominate his canvases the way they do the outback, anthropomorphised to appear as the ultimate survivors in an unforgiving landscape.
But it isn’t solely McMonagle’s unique observations on life and the milieu that makes these works so compelling. Concurrent to his propensity for quirky imagery is a deep and abiding respect for the act of painting. Each canvas is a testament to his commitment to technique and mark making, and the enjoyment he gets from pushing paint around while lost in the creative process. Though an important element of his work, his subject matter becomes less about conveying sentiment than it is a device for capturing attention and luring his audience in. Doggedly devoted to his artistic practice, he rehearses each piece by sketching and drawing his ideas multiple times so as to become intimately acquainted with every line and detail. By the time he is ready to commit to the canvas, he knows the image well enough that he is able to make his brushstrokes appear spontaneous and organically formed. Seen up close, each fragment of the whole could potentially be observed as its own abstracted composition, such is the detail of his work.
Born in New Zealand, Tim McMonagle has spent the majority of his life working and studying in Melbourne, Australia. Winner of the 2010 Fletcher Jones Art Prize for his work The happy song, he was named a finalist in the 2012 Archibald Prize for his portrait of art collector Michael Buxton, and has twice been amongst the Wynne Prize finalists (2015/16) for this series of tree landscapes. A veteran of over forty solo and group exhibitions, his work is held in major public, private and university collections throughout Australia.
Fletcher Jones Art Prize, Geelong Gallery, Geelong
The Shilo Project, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne
2009
Group Show: Gallery Artists, Murray White Room, Melbourne
Arthur Guy Memorial Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery
2008
Group Show, Kaliman Gallery, Sydney
2007
Received with thanks: New acquisitions 2001-07, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne
'Materiality', Switchback Gallery, Centre for Art and Design, Monash University, Gippsland
Campus
Monash University Collection: A selection of recent acquisitions, Monash University Museum of
Art
2005
'The Spirit of Football', National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square, Melbourne
'The difference between you and me', The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne
2004
Important Works on Paper, Crossley & Scott, Melbourne
'Siblings', RMIT Project Space, Melbourne
2003
The future in all directions, National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square, Melbourne
2002
Crossings: New Art from Australia, Galleria Lume and Gallery Atski, Helsinki
'It’s a beautiful day: New Painting in Australia 2', The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
AWARDS
2018
Finalist, Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2016
Finalist, Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2015
Finalist, Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2012
Finalist, Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2010
Winner, Fletcher Jones Art Prize, Geelong Gallery, Geelong
2009
Arthur Guy Memorial Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery
COLLECTIONS
Art Gallery of New South Wales National Gallery of Victoria University of Queensland Art Museum Heide Museum of Modern Art Newcastle Regional Gallery Wollongong Regional Gallery Ian Potter Museum of Art Monash University Museum of Art
Edith Cowan University RACV UBS Bank Macquarie Bank Artbank Michael Buxton Collection John McBride Collection Joyce Nissan Collection
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
2008
Feature, Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand, ed. Art & Australia
2007 Catalogue, Materiality, Switchback Gallery, Centre for Art and Design, Monash University
Catalogue, Monash University Collection: A selection of recent acquisitions, Monash University
Museum of Art
2006
Feature, John McDonald, Intimations of mortality, Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, 20–21
May, p 17
2005
Catalogue, Bala Starr, Stephen Zagala, The difference between you and me, Ian Potter Museum
of Art, Melbourne
Feature, Chris Beck, The Accidental Artist, The Age, 10 September
2003 Feature, Dominique Angeloro, Crack of dawn, Sydney Morning Herald, Metro, 12–18
December, p 26
2002 Feature, Bruce James, True-born child of the lens focuses on modern vision of nature, Sydney Morning Herald,11 December
Catalogue, Bala Starr, It’s a beautiful day: New painting in Australia 2, Ian Potter Museum of
Art, Melbourne, p 32–33
Catalogue, Peter Westwood, Crossing: New Art from Australia, RMIT, Melbourne, p 6–8
Tim McMonagle's painting 'Plaza' is currently on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the 'brick vase clay cup jug' exhibition.
Guest curator Glenn Barkley selected the artworks in 'brick vase clay cup jug' by typing the words of the exhibition title into the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ online collection database, retrieving objects linked only by a word or medium. Unlike the typical approach to making an exhibition, where works are grouped conceptually according to meanings or historical associations, this selection process is non-hierarchical and echoes the random groupings seen in gallery storage. Usually guided by pragmatic considerations – maximising space and access or caring for the collection – these incidental groupings can create inspiring and surprising links between disparate objects, art-handling equipment and exhibition furniture.
Barkley has then taken cues from these search results, either aesthetic or conceptual, to cast a wider net through the collection, creating new connections – many of which are personal, visual, intuitive and emotional – between artworks.
Established in 2015, the Bayside Painting Prize is one of the most generous non-acquisitive painting prizes in Australia. The exhibition draws together a breadth of artists with varied approaches to painting. This allows the Bayside City Council to futher promote artists to the Bayside community from across Australia, providing painters with support to continue their practice.
Tim McMonagle's work 'Put Upon' 2020 is a finalist in this year's prize.
'Lovelock' is the presentation of a new suite of paintings by Tim McMonagle that have been directly informed by a new suite of sound works, produced for this project by Paul Knight, who is resident in Berlin.
Transference. The change of elemental states. The search for a place not here nor there.
These were our early concepts for the exhibition. Be careful what you wish for. Despite an unpredictable year in all corners of the globe, the original framework for the project is in place: to commission work from one artist to inform the work of the other. The idea & process is elliptical and is revealed over a period of time in three sections.
The fulcrum is a set of paintings by Tim McMonagle. They will be made using source imagery around the idea of “A Place Between / Not here nor there”. We approached Paul Knight in Berlin to create source images generated by this diaristic photographic practice. Then the pandemic happened, and nothing was the same.
In isolation in Berlin, Paul had immersed himself in his music practice, making soundscapes without traditional song structures, using sources completely derived from synthetic sounds: purely electronic space. The fit with the original concept was perfect. We devised a limit of the 12” LP to set the duration of the material. The square of the LP cover echoes Tim’s exclusive canvas ratio, the square.
The six tracks are to be issued as source material to McMonagle for his body of paintings. Tim has always hankered to work with a non-visual source for a group of paintings & this serendipitous outcome has both artists exhilarated by the possibility of extending their practice.
- Greenwood Street Project
The final part of this work is the unification of the germinal sound work by Paul Knight. Tim McMonagle’s paintings, and documentation of the exhibition to be presented at Greenwood Street Project in early 2021 in an LP/catalogue.
Tim McMonagle intimately confronts both the fragile and robust nature of life. With an obsession for mark-making and the act of painting, he depicts humanised landscapes with whimsical contradictions of impasto and swathing washes. His paintings require a closer inspection, as dangling branches and wailing trees act like entwined torsos to question humanity’s relationship to the environment. Artist Profile spoke to McMonagle in his Melbourne studio for Issue 46.
Tim McMonagle is a finalist in the 2018 Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
In my painting 'Shadow captain' I was interested in capturing an imagined anthropomorphic nature. In the changing low light of dawn or dusk the large eucalyptus seems to twist and contort, fastened to the ground where it is anchored.'
The Sunshine Coast Art Prize is a national contemporary acquisitive award presented by Sunshine Coast Council. The Award is open to any artist who is an Australian resident, working in a 2D medium.
Forty finalists have been selected for an exhibition at the Caloundra Regional Gallery and the winning work will be added to the Sunshine Coast Art Collection.
Angela Goddard is the judge for the Sunshine Coast Prize 2017. Angela is the Director of Griffith Artworks, responsible for the Griffith University Art Collection and the Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane. Angela was previously the Curator of Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Winners announced 31 August.
Carrie McCarthy has written a thoughtful piece about Tim McMonagle's recent exhibition at Edwina Corlette Gallery for her brilliant blog Cultural Flanerie. The article coincided with Tim's first exhibition at the Gallery which continued his exploration of our majestic native gum trees.
There is something eerily familiar about the trees that have begun to sprout up in Tim McMonagle’s work in recent times. An artist who has spent almost two decades disseminating human nature’s foibles and absurdities through his whimsical compositions, McMonagle has increasingly found himself compelled to consider the curious lifecycle of our majestic native gums.
- Carrie McCarthy, Cultural Flanerie
IMAGE:
Install view of Tim McMonagle 'Recent work', image courtesy the artist
Tim McMonagle's work 'Ken Pearler' recently featured in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art's exhibition 'Painting. More Painting'.
Presented in two chapters across ACCA’s four exhibition galleries, Painting. More Painting was a big-picture focus on contemporary Australian painting, featuring the work of over 70 living Australian artists.
Conceived by ACCA Curator Annika Kristensen and Associate Curator Hannah Mathews, and developed in collaboration with ACCA’s new Artistic Director/CEO Max Delany, Painting. More Painting brought together a range of painting practices that reflected the medium’s enduring importance and its recent return to the centre of much public debate.
