
Exhibition of Paintings, Videos, and Plexiglass Panels Combining Baroque Patial
concepts with layered imagery and voluptuous density.
Exhibition of Paintings, Videos, and Plexiglass Panels Combine Baroque Patial concepts with layered imagery and voluptuous density.
Catalog of Artworks

Atlas of vanishing flora
A delicate atlas of singular blooms, each work a fleeting apparition of light and form. These miniature studies capture the essence of flowers as memory — untethered from place, suspended between being and disappearance.

Cloud Flora
Cloud Flora by James McGrath presents a Baroque interior filled with oversized blooms, exploring nature’s intersection with architectural space.

Digital experiments Dutchscapes
McGrath’s digital explorations traverse real-time data visualisation, experimental cloth simulations and LIDAR scans of Australian flora. These works expand his ongoing dialogue between Baroque spatial techniques and 21st-century data frameworks, collapsing the boundary between historical representation and environmental reality.

Ex Libris
Ex Libris is James McGrath’s full-scale reconstruction of the Strahov Library, a Baroque interior reimagined as both architectural memory and metaphor. Birds, rabbits, and falling flowers animate this space, embodying the artist’s awe, fragility, and reverence for the overwhelming beauty of inherited knowledge.

Flooded Baroque
Flooded Baroque by James McGrath reimagines historic libraries submerged in water, blending themes of cultural fragility and climate change in haunting, reflective stillness.

Ghost Trees
“Ghost Trees transforms environmental data from endangered Australian forests into a haunting audiovisual elegy, where LiDAR scans and bioacoustic recordings become a forest that sings its own disappearance.”

Lacuna/ Figure
This series reimagines classical mythology by combining 18th-century ceramic-style figures with vibrant Plexiglas overlays, creating a dialogue between tradition and modernity through layered color and light.

OCULAR/SPECULO
Ocular/Speculo uses abstract formalism to stage the moment of rupture. Spherical forms and floral fragments are stretched, mirrored, and shattered across circular and multi-panel canvases. James McGrath distorts the still life tradition through illusions of reflection, as if the viewer is witnessing the splintered surface of a mirrored orb. Petals become shards, and the act of seeing becomes fractured—folded inward, like the eye itself.

Quadratura
“In the Quadratura series, I reimagined the drama of Baroque art by blending traditional oil painting with digital simulations, inspired by Andrea Pozzo’s iconic ceiling frescos. These works explore the tension between figure and frame, creating cascading narratives and dynamic folds that collapse time and space, inviting viewers into a dialogue between history and contemporary abstraction.”

Rabbits + Books
In this series, James McGrath uses rabbits as self-portraits—timid figures navigating the overwhelming grandeur of a baroque library. Their quiet presence captures the artist’s awe, hesitation, and the fragile impulse to create in the shadow of towering knowledge.

Sphaeraflora
The spherical composition, reminiscent of 16th-century globes, encapsulates a vibrant array of Australian flora, exploring the tension between Western artistic heritage and the unique beauty of the Australian landscape.

Titians Gaze
A series of commissioned pieces based on based on Titian woodcuts

Banksia Breath
In “”Banksia Breath,”” McGrath immerses a digitally captured Greek sculpture of Daphne within swirling Australian Banksia, animating classical beauty with Antipodean wildness.

CUSP (paintings)
CUSP (1999) 1st Solo exhibition, blends traditional painting and digital techniques to create dynamic, textured works that explore the interplay of surface and depth, inspired by Baroque drama and Dutch still life.

Dutchscapes
Combining baroque drapery and Dutch still-life motifs in a 3D digital stage, these works use cloth simulation and image mapping to explore folds, flicker, blur, and a rich baroque experience.

Falling folds
In Falling Folds, James McGrath digitally creates flowing fabric, blending classical Baroque imagery with modern technology to explore illusion and how we experience space.

Forest Lucuna
In Lacuna, McGrath transforms an indecipherable Australian forest into a Baroque library, visualizing gaps in memory, culture, and landscape.

Ghost Trees: Four Trees
“A digital elegy composed from LIDAR scans of four individual trees, this work explores the spectral geometry of nature in decline. Each tree—captured as a cloud of data points—hovers between presence and absence, its form dissolving into shimmering digital mist. The piece reflects our fragmented relationship to the environment: fragmented not only by ecological loss, but by the tools we use to measure it.”

Natura Venor (hunting)
This series engages deeply with art theory and history by recontextualizing the traditional motifs of hunting scenes and Dutch still life within a contemporary ecological narrative.

Ornament + Body
The Ornament and Figure series features large-scale silk screens and drawings on linen, combining tattoo-inspired motifs with Renaissance figure studies.

Quadratura (digital)
James McGrath’s work merges Baroque theatricality with digital precision, building 3D Baroque-inspired digital environments where digitally simulated draped fabrics and reflective surfaces evoke fragility and grandeur. Inspired by historical illusions and contemporary anxieties, his art explores containment and impermanence, blurring boundaries between natural and artificial forms.

Salon
In Salon, museum spaces are reimagined as unfolding pages—blurring the line between architecture, image, and memory. Baroque illusion and digital folds create shifting interiors where figures and flora drift across distorted planes. These works transform the static salon into a fluid, theatrical space of reflection and rupture.

The Visual Worlds of James McGrath
James McGrath’s work defies simple classification. Drawing from Dutch still life and Renaissance perspective, he creates intricate visual worlds that question art’s ability to represent reality. His paintings are both homage and critique—celebrating beauty while exposing its artifice. Through motifs like glass spheres and mirrored surfaces, McGrath examines fragility, containment, and impermanence, reflecting modern anxieties about ecological and cultural preservation. His work blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, inviting viewers to reconsider the legacy of Western art and confront the contradictions of representation.

Vison + VerseVison + Verse
London based show exploring Williams Blake.I n Vision + Verse, James McGrath reinterprets William Blake by placing his original drawings into 3D environments of simulated cloth. These draped forms don’t just frame Blake—they absorb him. As the cloth gradually replaces the figure, the work stages a visual misreading: influence as substitution. The result is a series of immersive images that transform Blake’s visionary intensity into a sensual, shifting fabric of thought.

Wattle River
A digitally scanned wattle bloom, oversized and cloud-like, drifts through aerial footage of an Australian river, unsettling the landscape with a surreal and haunting presence.

Birds + Books
“Books and Birds” places elegant avian figures into baroque libraries, creating poetic contrasts between living nature and static knowledge. It is a subtle meditation on ecological fragility and the enduring yet threatened existence of historical texts.

CUSP SXS
CUSP by James McGrath and Barton Staggs transformed the sandstone cliffs of Tamarama Beach into an immersive fusion of digital art, nature, and sound for Sculpture by the Sea.

Flower and Lens
Inspired by a Jeffery Smart mural in my childhood home. The series of works investigate the removal of the mid ground to simplified folded ornamented foreground.

Eucalyptus Tunnel
A digital video that transforms 19th-century Australian botanical prints into an immersive floral tunnel, merging natural history with cinematic motion.

Floating Still Lifes
In this series, I place classical still life elements—flowers, fruit, vessels—inside a glass-like cube that reflects and distorts them. For me, the cube represents both the inner space of the imagination and the curated frame of a museum. I’m interested in how these objects, once suspended and refracted, become something rarefied—caught between stillness and fragmentation, history and illusion.

Ghost Nets
Ghost Nets (2010) is a haunting video installation by James McGrath, projected directly onto the rocks at Tamarama Beach for Sculpture by the Sea. Using footage of swimmers entangled in nets and filmed underwater at night, the work evokes the silent menace of drifting fishing nets in our oceans—both beautiful and catastrophic.

Infrared Baroque
This exhibition is based on McGrath’s travels around Italy Using a special infrared video camera to create new paintings.

Ocular Fleur
James McGrath’s Ocular/Fleur blends Baroque theatricality with digital innovation, using reflective spheres to explore beauty, perception, and ecological melancholy.

Ornament +Fold
Inspired by a childhood memory of a Jeffrey Smart mural, Ornament and the Fold collapses midground into richly pleated surfaces. Architectural space gives way to ornament, form becoming fabric—where visual structure folds under its own decorative weight.

Ornament + Body
Inspired by a childhood memory of a Jeffrey Smart mural, Ornament and the Fold collapses midground into richly pleated surfaces. Architectural space gives way to ornament, form becoming fabric—where visual structure folds under its own decorative weight.

Quadratura (pozzo's view)
This series reimagines the perspectival illusions of 17th-century Baroque ceiling painter Andrea Pozzo. Using oil painting and digital cloth simulation, McGrath collapses architecture, narrative, and viewpoint into immersive, frameless panoramas. Figures tumble from virtual frescoes, caught mid-fall between image and illusion, tradition and technology.

Shadow Trees
Shadow Trees is a digital video work that evokes the sensation of filtered light through foliage, using shifting darkness and sound to create a meditative, abstract forest shaped by memory and motion.

Tidal Vector
“Commissioned by the Museum of Sydney, Tidal Vectors is a digital installation visualising the dynamic flow of Sydney Harbour. Using scientific data, the work layers animation, projection, and sound to reframe the harbour as a living, cultural site. The immersive soundscape is composed by Barton Staggs.”

Threads of Flora
James McGrath’s work defies simple classification. Drawing from Dutch still life and Renaissance perspective, he creates intricate visual worlds that question art’s ability to represent reality. His paintings are both homage and critique—celebrating beauty while exposing its artifice. Through motifs like glass spheres and mirrored surfaces, McGrath examines fragility, containment, and impermanence, reflecting modern anxieties about ecological and cultural preservation. His work blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, inviting viewers to reconsider the legacy of Western art and confront the contradictions of representation.

Threads of Flora
James McGrath’s work defies simple classification. Drawing from Dutch still life and Renaissance perspective, he creates intricate visual worlds that question art’s ability to represent reality. His paintings are both homage and critique—celebrating beauty while exposing its artifice. Through motifs like glass spheres and mirrored surfaces, McGrath examines fragility, containment, and impermanence, reflecting modern anxieties about ecological and cultural preservation. His work blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial, inviting viewers to reconsider the legacy of Western art and confront the contradictions of representation.
Currently on show: The Spheres of Narcissus
16 OCT TO 9 NOV | OLSENSYDNEY



Ghost Trees
10 AUG TO 8 SEPT | NFSA ACTON
An immersive journey into the digital memory of an endangered forest.
Ghost Trees
10 AUG TO 8 SEPT | NFSA ACTON
An immersive journey into the digital memory of an endangered forest.
Recent Work/Installed
Artworks ranging from painting to immersive large scale immersive works

Digital mural
A digital re-imagining of floral Dutch still life.
80 Collins Street, Melbourne

Synced Projectors
Wetlands and flora
555 Collins Street, Melbourne Sydney

Digital art
Significant Islamic Flora supersized into transparent point clouds
Dubai

Immersive nature
The virtual children’s tree An Ode to Growth in a Transient Space
Sydney

Immersive
“Ghost Trees” 120 projectors, 50 speakers
“Ghost Trees” 120 projectros, 50 speakers
Lume Melbourne, South Wharf, Victoria, Australia

Digital art
The Virtual Children’s Tree
Sydney
Ai Digital Twin
6 of Australia’s leading digital native artists to create 2 works – one using traditional digital tools, and the other using AI software to be shown side by side, inviting viewers to contemplate their different reactions and concerns to both pieces
Gallery of past works
Paintings and snippets from videos from last 12 months
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Recent Work/Installed
Artworks ranging from painting to immersive large scale immersive works

Digital mural
A digital re-imagining of floral Dutch still life.
80 Collins Street, Melbourne

The virtual children’s tree
An Ode to Growth in a Transient Space
Sydney

“Ghost Trees” 120 projectros, 50 speakers
Lume Melbourne, South Wharf, Victoria, Australia

Wetlands and flora
555 Collins Street, Melbourne Sydney

Significant Islamic Flora supersized into transparent point clouds
Dubai

The virtual children’s tree
Sydney
AI digital twin
6 of Australia’s leading digital native artists to create 2 works – one using traditional digital tools, and the other using AI software to be shown side by side, inviting viewers to contemplate their different reactions and concerns to both pieces


Gallery of past works
Paintings and snippets from videos from last 12 months
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Any questions
or project
ideas?

Contact Me
Any questions or project ideas?

Contact Me