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

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

“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.”

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 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.

“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.”

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.

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.

A series of commissioned pieces based on based on Titian woodcuts

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

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.

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.

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

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

“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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.