North West: Karl Maughan

Karl Maughan’s work is among the most readily recognisable contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand. Renowned for his often large-scale, luxuriant garden paintings, Maughan tends to his compositions with the same meticulous care and patience as a horticulturalist tending to a living landscape. Carefully considering the precise calibration of colour, texture and form, Maughan paints an array of flora in his distinctive, vibrant style.

North West is a body of work that sees Maughan place the viewer on sandy shores, garden paths and luscious grass banks where glimpses of water peek through the landscapes leading us into the beyond. Each painting is comprised from sections of different gardens transported from Maughan’s prolific photographic archives which are then transposed and rearranged onto the canvas. What emerges is less a faithful transcription of nature than an idealised fiction; an assemblage of blossoms and foliage that fuse the real with the imagined. Void of natural imperfections and unbridled by the prevailing rules and rhythms of nature and weather, his gardens are transfigured into visions of abundance that evoke feelings of a perpetual spring.