Marian Maguire featured in Art Zone
Lithographic love
The highly-accomplished Christchurch artist and gallery owner Marian Maguire likes to stay low profile. She explains why to Sarah Lang in a rare interview with ART ZONE.
Maguire is best known for her printmaking: lithographs and etchings that borrow from the aesthetics of ancient Greek and Māori imagery, mythology, and history. Many New Zealand art galleries, museums, and institutional collections hold her work, and she has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Maguire has done many etchings (prints made from metal plates incised using acid). “But lithography has always been my favourite medium.”
In the 1980s, Maguire studied at Christchurch’s Ilam School of Fine Arts, majoring in printmaking. In 1986 she undertook the Professional Printer Trainer Programme at the Tamarind Institute of Lithography, in Albuquerque, USA. “I never dreamed I’d make a living as an artist. I thought ‘I’ll do print-making for other people while I make my own work’.”
She did just that. In 1984, her final year at Ilam, teacher Barry Cleavin suggested she and Ralph Hotere (1931–2013) collaborate to produce lithographic prints. That working relationship lasted 24 years, making around a hundred lithographs and the pair becoming close friends. Over 25 years, Maguire also collaborated with significant New Zealand artists to create original lithographic prints. Think Bill Hammond, Gretchen Albrecht, John Reynolds and Euan Macleod, for extended periods. She has also worked with Dick Frizzell, Fatu Feu’u, Bill Culbert, Philippa Blair, Alexis Hunter, Robert Ellis, John Pule, and Richard Killeen.
Read the full article here or purchase at PG gallery192.