Aoibhin Maguire

Aoibhin Maguire, b.1997 is a painter from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who now lives and works in London. She obtained her BA in Fine Art from Lancaster University, graduating with First Class Honours in 2019. Aoibhin has exhibited work in a variety of locations across the UK, such as The Open Eye Gallery, The Tub, Hackney, Espacio Gallery, The Function Suite and RuptureXIBIT. She has also curated (and exhibited in) a group show at RuptureXIBIT titled 'Coping, in Colour', featuring the work of six London based artists. Internationally, Aoibhin has exhibited in spaces such as Baku Gallery, C3 Lab, Rowe Galleries Juried Exhibition and Charlotte Art League, North Carolina, USA.

The first year of Aoibhin's MA was online due to the pandemic, so she used this time to take over a vacant retail space in a mall in Lisburn, Northern Ireland to open her own gallery and studio. She loved being able to work with local artists and help showcase their work, the highlight being her curation of a group exhibition 'EMERGING: A Room Full of Art' to help support local artists after the hardships endured during the pandemic, as well as hosting workshops and other events before relocating to London for her second year.

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My paintings are worlds of juxtapositions. Stories of disorder, or maybe just a different type of order. They are a dance between love and anger, fear and ecstasy, anxiety and bliss. A push and pull between hope and desperation, a constant conflict on canvas. They are filled with emotion, reoccurring symbols and a dose of nostalgia. Sometimes my subject matter cannot, for various reasons, be visited in the physical form, and thus I paint it, I reclaim it, and I transform it. The works are an overlap of autobiography and vivid imagination, of memory and the unspeakable, of adulthood and innocence. At times they are like parallel universes. Who would I be if I did not do that one thing? They are lighthearted but not. Funny but serious. And they will always be colourful. Colour is my constant.