Lot 5: TIM McMONAGLE , Australian 1971 - CRABBERS Oil on linen

Oil on linen

183 by 183cm

Tim McMonagle, Kaliman Gallery, Sydney, 5 May - 3 June 2006

Kaliman Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne'; purchased from the above in 2006

Painted in 2006
Tim McMonagle was born in 1971. He completed an Advanced Certificate in Art and Design at Western Metropolitan College of TAFE in 1990 and his Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1994. He has participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions in contemporary art spaces and museums, including Seen something more (RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, 2001) and It's a beautiful day:new painting in Australia 2 (Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002). McMonagle's work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery and the John McBride Collection, Tokyo.

With their linear distinctive, linear-illustrative quality and their array of bathers, hammocks, thongs and dogs, Tim McMonagle's paintings initially proclaim a certain innocence of vision. Yet behind he ironically and photographically constructed narratives, McMonagle is something of a formalist. He always employs the challenging (for the artist, 'pure') square format, and demonstrates a particular concern for surface and points of transition. In the present work, behind the pinkly unblemished crabbers, the artist lovingly traces a sequence of horizontal bands, from patterned net to reflecting pools to the littoral blue and distant atmospheric headland.