Brian Maguire’s pictures show that people, buildings and landscapes do not stand alone but embody the society in which they exist

BRIAN MAGUIRE is well known as an artist whose work combines a traditional, lyrical expressionist mode of painting and drawing with concrete involvement in social and political issues.

In Casa da Cultura, made for the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1998 for example, he made portrait drawings of children from the Favela Vila Prudente and alongside the portraits themselves he exhibited photographs of the drawings displayed in the home of each child. The project was part of an ongoing process of "re-contextualising portraiture", removing it from its conventional domain of wealth and privilege and setting it among those marginalised in society – the poor, the rejected and outsiders of all kinds.

More recently he’s been involved in developing work relating to the horrific abduction and murder of more than 1,000 young women around Juárez in northern Mexico (these paintings will form part of an exhibition at Visual in Carlow later this year, along with work by two other artists who have addressed the subject, Teresa Margolies and Lise Bjørne Linnert).

In the meantime Notes on 14 Paintings, his new exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery, covers a great deal of ground, from Dublin to Mexico and several locations on mainland Europe. It's his first solo show since he left his position as Head of Fine Art at the NCAD early last year.

Given his reputation as an anti-establishment figure, he surprised many observers when he took on the job there in 2000. The phrase “poacher turned gamekeeper” never seemed more apposite. In the event, he did manage to foster an ethos of social and community involvement in the college but it’s hard to see him as someone who was ever going to be entirely at ease with academic bureaucracy.

“I was trying to do the two things – the college and my own work – and I think I’d reached the end of my energy, really,” he sas.

At the same time, he points out that because of the socially engaged nature of what he does, he’s had to learn to deal with all manner of institutional bureaucracy: he’s been artist-in-residence in prisons in Ireland, Poland, Canada and the United States, and practically every other undertaking besides has involved detailed negotiation and organisation. And he retains links with the college by working on a research project with an MA student.

The 14 paintings in the Kerlin show are dominated by architecture. “But,” he explains, “they’re about architecture as a social reality rather than as a speculative investment or all the other things we got used to hearing about.”

The series and the exhibition began, he says, when he read of council plans to close public swimming pools. “I was stunned. I began to think about public buildings and how they are not just essential social spaces, they’re also symbolically significant: they are really saying what kind of society you live in.”

There’s a painting of a splendid public swimming pool. “Several people have said they recognise it. In fact they don’t – it’s in Vienna – but they identify with it, it seems familiar.”

Similarly, when he was in Mexico, in Chihuahua, he visited a church. “Churches are built by the people, they fund them, so in a real sense they own them. I was interested to see so many young people in the church, in a completely matter-of-fact, very comfortable way. I thought, maybe there’s some hope for the future in that, the church as a focus of community because, frankly, there isn’t much else there.”

Looking at Ireland, he began to wonder "what monuments we have here, and of course I thought of Anglo Irish Bank". The concrete shell of the bank's new HQ in Dublin's Docklands is there in a painting titled Contemporary Ruin. It's contrasted with a view of a modernist apartment block in Paris. Maguire has a studio there, in the north of the city.

“It’s a very ordinary area. It’s not chic. But as I’ve come to know it I’ve realised how well it works. I mean, it’s possible for ordinary families to live in the middle of cities, if the resources and attention to detail are there, and they are. Which is exactly what we didn’t do with all the building that went on during the boom here.”

Another painting features a complex railway junction in Turin, a puzzle of criss-crossing lines. “The railways in Europe always astound me. They’re so good. And you can go anywhere. They remind me of what the Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said when he heard they were going to issue third-class train tickets. He was outraged that the working class would be able to go wherever they liked. Well, they were.”

There is another pair of contrasting landscapes. One, titled Social Democracy, features a wilderness of rolling wintery terrain. "It's a region where I go walking in Norway. It huge and protected, and it's completely safe. You pay about €20 a day and you can follow pathways through this spectacular world."

On the other hand, there is a view of Morecambe Bay in England. “It’s where, in 2004, over 20 Chinese cockle pickers were caught by the tide and drowned. I was there recently. There is this stunning landscape but in the end it’s coloured by that tragedy and the hard economic reality.”

Economics is always there somewhere. One of several “re-contextualised” portraits in the exhibition is of a seamstress who makes designer boxers. “It’s simple, really,” Maguire says. “The skill is hers but the profit isn’t. How can we reconcile these two worlds?”

Notes on 14 Paintings by Brian Maguire. Kerlin Gallery, South Anne St, Dublin 2. Until May 14