Richard Magee
Richard Magee (b. 1994, Derry, Ireland), lives and works in Vienna, Germany. He studied at the Slade School in London from 2013-17, after being introduced to art practice at the Void Art School in Derry. Subiquity, he studied of Jutta Koether’s in Hamburg, and held an achievement grant from the Hamburger Behörde für Wissenschaft, Forschung, Gleichstellung und Bezirke. Previously he was awarded the CW Boise Travel Scholarship and a SIAP award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
“(False) Rumour” was a 2018 project that the artist undertook while traveling around the South Western region of the USA. He took a stack of pre-printed A4 pages on the journey, and with these, he recorded and documented his experiences through drawing, writing, and photography. These works are a continuation of that first project, with overlapping, heavily built-up prints utilizing the original drawings to create an abstract web that the artist has continued to work on with watercolors, inks, and pens. He sees them as a way of trying to visualize our internal mind’s eye when we try to remember or think about the past. Magee draws on the concept of ‘palimpsest’ in his work. A palimpsest is “a written document, usually on vellum or parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of erased writing still visible.”
The ‘94 Channel Tunnel painting is one piece from an ongoing project that uses source material from the artist’s birth year – 1994 – as a starting point for generating paintings that reconsider the past. Here, a diagram of the Channel Tunnel which opened in 1994, and a timeline diagram of various historical buildings found in a children’s encyclopedia from the same year are juxtaposed. The canvas itself is made up of five separate attached pieces; the top and bottom tiers are painted using homemade paint made from soil and glue, alluding to archaeological layers underground and the passing of time.
A raised layer subtly unifies the painting, adding an organic element and the association of canvas as a kind of skin. In places, the raised layer is worn or scratched off. Ultimately, the painting is postured as a kind of surrogate body that has experienced damage or neglect, comprised of elements from the past. This allows us to interface with and evaluate the past in a way that is in stark contrast to the contemporary spectacle of the media, which is always fleetingly focused on the present.