Brian Maguire: La Grande Illusion – unmissable exhibition opens at Hugh Lane Gallery

The Dublin gallery opens ‘La Grande Illusion’, a powerful new exhibition by acclaimed Irish artist and human rights advocate Brian Maguire. ‘La Grande Illusion’ opens on Thursday October 3 and will run until March 23, 2025.

The exhibition spans two decades of work, spotlighting the artist’s repeated quest to draw attention to global injustices, war, and human rights.

La Grande Illusion examines a period of intense productivity for Maguire: 2007–2024, exploring his activism through large-scale paintings from projects in Juárez, Mexico the Mediterranean, Aleppo, South Sudan, the Amazon, Arizona and Brazil.

Themes of violence, the drug and gun trades, and damage to the environment are all evident. By embedding himself in the communities he paints - from the streets of Juarez to the warn-torn neighbourhoods of Aleppo - Maguire uses his canvas as testimony to the silenced and the forgotten.

Brian Maguire, Cocaine Laundry: HSBC, 2015. Image courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. © Brian Maguire

“Art for Maguire is a radical process of passion and indignation, which carries the potential of alternative futures, said Michael Dempsey, Head of Exhibitions at Hugh Lane Gallery. “In the exhibition, Maguire presents an expanded view of war, seen as a constant cycle of corrupted power and death – it encompasses capital, class, gender, and post-colonial legacies. Intimate and uncompromising, his paintings form a demand for social justice and are an act of solidarity with families and communities.”

Maguire’s work has been celebrated in museums and galleries worldwide, igniting critical conversations on human rights through his visceral and intimate paintings.

In looking at the plight of those erased by media or state institutions, Maguire reminds us why painting matters:

“The image carries the present, the medium carries the hope. The perpetrators of the injustice are worldwide and singular and that’s what makes the stories the same. The individual painting is anecdotal but when taken as a body of work, it represents global capitalism which while invisible is at the same time all pervasive.”

Brian Maguire, William Earle, Sudan 1880, 2018. Image courtesy Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. © Brian Maguire

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring illuminating essays by Lucy Cotter, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Marc Donnadieu and Michael Dempsey.

La Grande Illusion is co-curated by Michael Dempsey, Head of Exhibitions and Barbara Dawson Director, Hugh Lane Gallery.

Admission is free. Hugh Lane Gallery is located on Parnell Square North, a 10 minute walk from O’Connell Street.

Related events:

Evening Lecture - Keynote Address
Wednesday October 9, 6.30pm-8pm
Michael O’Flaherty, Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe will be giving a keynote address on ‘The Artist as Defender of Human Rights’. This talk is in tandem with the Brian Maguire exhibition La Grande Illusion.
Tickets are Free – Book here

• For more information, click here.