RICHARD MAGUIRE

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CV (select)
There Is No Beginning, As There Is No End
Wherein Difference Lies
Amidst Relations
In The Absence Of Pleasure
Ghungroo
What Happens To Remain Unsaid




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Wherein Difference Lies, a corresponding publication to an exhibition of the same name
is available to purchase from Post Times at a cost of $20 USD + shipping.
 Purchase: In The Absence Of Pleasure publication via.  Village Books (edition of 150)



                 





email: maguirer [at] live . co. uk.
instagram:@richardsarkermaguire






CV (SELECT)

EDUCATION

2018:

2015:

2013:

2012;


SOLO SHOWS


2026:

2025:

2024:

2023:




GROUP EXHIBITONS:


2026:




2025:






2024:









2023: Full CV is available Upon Request.



The Glasgow School of Art,     UK

The  Royal Drawing School,     UK

The Gray’s School of Art,           UK

The Academy of Fine Art, Prague, Czechia





There Is No Beginning As There is No End, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh 

Wherein Difference Lies, Post Times, New York

Amidst Relations,  Patron Gallery, Chicago

In The Absence of Pleasure,  Village Gallery, Leeds

What Happened To Remain Unsaid, Maximillian William, London






Drawing Biennial,  Drawing Room, London

A Person, Chosen, Named or Honored, Patron Gallery, Chicago


Teague’s Path, Galerie Timonier, New York

Under Lunar Influence, Cabanon, Paris

Talisman, Cardion Arts, London


Drawing Room, Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles

Situational Attempts, The Artist Room, London

The Drawing Biennial, Drawing Room, London

White Columns, Annual Benefit Exhibition, New York




The Ingram Prize, Cromwell Place, London

Like Paradise, Claridge's Art Space, London

Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, London (touring), Uk

Platform, Trintiy Apse, Edinburgh Art Festival, UK
02Wherein Difference Lies
Post Times
New York
2025 Art Photographs by Sam Hutchinson.
Installation photographs provided courtesy of Post Times, New York.


Available to view at: Contemporary Art Library





Wherein Difference Lies


Material: graphite and pencil on paper, graphite and solvent transfer on paper
Year of Production: 2023-2024

A dancer, stands against a wall in a New York Apartment. He poses for an audience of two, performing gestures in costumes against one of many drapes that will come to furnish the walls. Within the frame of the image a scantily clad Ram Gopal appears -- in a manner that positions him as fervent with exotic promise--alongside the ubiquitous drapery of of an "eastern" print, comprised of various scenes: a eated man carried upon a palanquin; another man climbs a tree pregnant with fruit, one man gestures to a bird beneath a tree, a bear bears its teeth and in the final scene a seated man smokes a pipe typical of West Asian Coffeehouses.

It is from such imagery Maguire finds his modus operandi, using Gopal as both subject proper and proxy, Maguire explores the aesthetics and political histories through close-looking and mimesis working between layers of interconnected histories of orientalist sexuality and race.

The 16 drawings produced between 2023 and 2024 cross representations from varying archival sources between America, Britain and India. The works from detail cropped elements of portraits, film stills from television archives, photographs from the indian diapora in the UK, adaptations from Sri Lankan artist Lionel Wendt .

This exhibition is accomponied by a publication, with a text by Sean Burns and is available to purchase from Post Times, for $20 + shipping.

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There Is No Beggining, As There Is No End
Collective Gallery
Edinburgh
2026 Art Photographs by artist.
Installation photographs copyright Eoin Carey provided courtesy of Collective








There Is No Beginning, As There Is No End


Material: graphite on paper; coloured pencil on paper; cast pewter and stainless steel; carved limestone; clay, acrylic, and limestone dust on paper.

Year of Production: 2026



 “There Is No Beginning, As There is No End” takes as its premise from a rhetorical framework devised from a constellation of Jasbir Puar’s “Terrorist Assemblages” and Anjali Arondekar’s “For The Record”, in which (homo) sexuality has been used historically and contemporaneously as both cudgel and shield and Indrani Chatterjee’s “Abolition by Denial” and Jyoti Puri’s  “Sexual States” which thinking about the legal infrastructure created and deployed for the aims of creating, managing and transferring populations between carcerality and novel means of of fiscal productivity.

.In negotiating how homophobia in South Asia in the past was ascribed in an orientalist manner of cultural-political atavism she posits how co-ordinated ascription was used strategically over the Indian subcontinent as means to justify fiscal and social domination. Arondekar states, and other historians interested in “queer genealogies” like Boone (The Homoerotics of Orientalism) and  cite orientalist figures and actions like those of Richard Burton, and his alleged reports of a male brothel in Karachi (now Pakistan) amidst others on the criminal acts of  “racial groupings” and “sexual degenerates” of British India formed part of such strategies of divide and rule, in addition to obscuring the larger violences of colonial rule such as those formed through the supposed abolition of slavery (as noted by Chatterjee this was applicable only to those who generally worked in agricultural fields, or were bonded to sacred lands) in creating new forms of criminality for the like: proscribed gendered embodiment,  vagrancy, compulsed labour on plantations in both Indian subcontinent, The Dutch East Indies, and The Carribean.

Puar’s work on the other hand, famous for its coinage of the term pink-washing and homonationalism, remarks on how religious orthodoxy and its observers particularly those interpolated as minorities within (the state) have (their un-acceptance of liberalised) sexuality used as a weapon.  In acknowledging Puar’s work noting the weaponisation of sexuality, the work focuses specifically in the wake of the repeal of India’s Section 377 (the penal anti-sodomy law). Yet, in a acts of political triangulation by theorists like Jyoti Puri have stated minority communities were both often disproportionately targeted under the repealed law, and subject too to extrajudicial harassment by state arms. 

Sat under a former observatory in Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, a site integral in the development of British Enlightenment Ideals and one of the cities the benefitted most from Empire’s consequence, the gallery contained by architecture and fortressed stone walls – it pushes against a rhetorical strait that often lacks thoughts about the recursive consequences of  Empire.
The subsequent work of “There Is No Beginning, As There Is No End” considers how the modern of state of India using the remaining religious statuary of Hindu temples as an example of cultural-religious hospitality whilst simultaneously erasing the Islamicate textual and visual precedents. In positioning an un-ending continuation of how sodomy/ (homo)sexuality has been both subject of state violence and itself been used as a rubric of violence, the exhibition explores motifs that find itself entrenched in the violent apparatus of state devised by the extractive colonial state - and its intended subjects: labourers, chain 
03.Amidst Relations

Patron Gallery
Chicago
USA

 Photographs by Evan Jenkins, provided courtesy of Patron Gallery, Chicago
AMIDST RELATIONS

Graphite on paper, graphite on found  paper,  graphite on paper mounted on  found paper.

Constructed from disparate archival, personal, and mass-distributed images of women from the Indian Subcontinent, Maguire attempts to map a constellation of manners in which Anglo-Indian women found themselves equally enmeshed in the project of British Colonialism and alienated from the native peoples of British India (now Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) through projects of (violent) intimacy.

The image of Merle Oberon is used recurrently as both a prox and signifier for such intimate relations. Oberon was by her grandmother under the impression that she was her mother. Merle's grandmother gave birth to her mother who was born a child through rape on a plantation, who in turn, bore Merle through similar circumstances. As she garnered fame, and to bypass the racial segregation of America her grandmother/maid assumes the identity of her maid to maintain themselves as a family unit.
There are no images of her mother, so in place of a historical aporia she is substituted by images of Merle Oberon playing Cathy in Wuthering Heights ( a film largely about Britain's growing racial anxiety and elite cruelty) alongside a women acting as her maid.

04.In The Absence Of Pleasure

Village Gallery
Leeds
2023 Photographs by Denis Guzel, 
provided courtesy of Maximillian William, London & Village Gallery

IN THE ABSENCE OF PLEASURE
GRAPHITE ON PAPER, SOLVENT TRANSFER ON PAPER


In Richard Maguire’s intricate drawings, colonial spectres are revived, offering glimpses of the often obscured intimate relationships between master and servant. In academic texts between the Australasian and South Asian subcontinent, the lack of historical prosecution is taken to suggest there were no such intimacies or abuses between Black and South Asian servants/slaves and their masters in a racial calculi that obliterates chances of reexamining histories of intimate encounters and intimate violence.


For the works in this exhibition, Maguire draws from the colonial archives and mass produced postcards by Higginbotham & Co, Madras which depict South Asian men, flora and fauna and the shadows of images (?). This exoticised, lush imagery is dissected and reanimated in Maguire’s drawings examining the complexity of those who found or created beauty within the absence of pleasure.

Text by Uma Karavadra


Purchase a copy of  the accompanying publication from Village £8.00 + shipping.
05.Ghungroo

Platform, Trinity Apse
Edinburgh Art Festival
2023 Photos by Sally Jubb
provided courtesy of Edinburgh Art Festival





GHUNGROO, SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATION, TRINITY APSE, EDINBURGH
AS PART OF PLATFORM 2023 (WITH AQSA ARIF, CRYSTAL BENNES & RUDY KANHYE)

GRAPHITE ON PAPER, SOLVENT TRANSFER ON PAPER, SILVER EMBROIDERY ON CALICO, GLASS BEAD TRIM, CAST SOLDERING METAL, ENAMEL COATED EPOXY CLAY, INHERITED FLOWERS, NATURAL DYE PRINT ON INHERITED CARD, PALM LEAVES & ENCASED WOODEN STRUCTURE

Encased wooden structure was made by Simon Worthington

Taking as its premise the uprooting and removal of the infant Peggy Hall,  the child of an East India Companyman and an unknown Indian woman
and her transfer from India to Scotland. Maguire moves across the shipping logs of Peggy and her property, including a nursemaid. Upon Peggy’s arrival the nursemaid is returned to India, and later Peggy’s inherited assests appear to be transferred and distributed amongt her paternal family.

Thinking about  the returned woman, and the practices of Indian Company men often bequething women to their natal offspring as slaves. Maguire Speculatively, navigates the wanton and purposeful  through destroyed material culture and missing cultural practices absent in Hall’s life, and more largely in communities abundant with difference to present (third/trans gender and religious minorities) to think about what kind of formations may be necessary to bridge social alienation.
06What Happens To Remain Unsaid

Maximillian William
London
2023 Photographs by Denis Guzel, provided courtesy of Maximillian William, London.
view at contemporary art library


What Happened To Remain Unsaid

Graphite on paper, Graphite on found papaer, Graphite on paper mounted on found paper.

Within Aubrey Menen's Autobiography 'The Space Within The Heart', Menen recounts a series of events leading him to work for The British in India overseeing and surveilling adivasi's in a jungle. Starting from performing a sex act with another man for a white women's interest in the mechanics of same-sex practices (who was part of the Bloomsbury group), he discovers his mother has had a private detective surveilling him - he had previously been taken to court for his play "Genesis", and was about to be reported for sodomy and had been working for a prolonged period for The India League attempting to aid in the decolonisation from British rule. At this point his Indian father helps him escape to India working for his upper class relatives where he now helps in the cultural production of the anti-war effort this. Written through a series of flashbacks, and Jamesian construction he awakes from a terror (then) realising his enmeshment in the colonisation of India and its futility. And again in Rome after converting to catholocism all the way back through his Irish mother's indoctrination by Catholic Missionaries, and a brown doll.

Midnight Horror is also the english name for a plant based within Indian Jungles, where a tree's pods appear like hanging swords and fall to its roots appearing like a mass of broken bones.

In What Happens To Remain Unsaid, Maguire  uses similar historical figures whose lives  have been structured through mechanisms of  subordination through sexuality through meticulously rendered drawings of objects and portraits. Including Anglo-Asian acctress Merle Oberon a child and grandchild of intergenerational rape on Indian tea plantations. He auses her visage and her uncanny, and  synchronous appearance in the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights,  a film in which she transcends her racial ambiguity and acts alongside in a story that positions  Oberon as Cathy against Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff a ‘wild’ racialised man.