Expo Chicago 2025: OLIVIA MUSGRAVE, ANNE MAGILL, MELITA DENARO, ANDREW GIFFORD

Anne Magill was born in County Down, Northern Ireland in 1962. She studied in Liverpool before moving to London to complete her degree at St Martin’s School of Art. After graduating in 1984, Anne Magill worked as an illustrator where she quickly built a reputation for her evocative drawings in charcoal and pastel, winning the B&H Gold Illustration Awards four times.

 

Alongside her work as a commercial artist, she started to experiment with more intimate charcoal drawings based on memories reflecting her time spent with the army in Belfast, at Greenham Common and in Paris during her studies. The rapid, reportage drawings she made during this time became the precursor to a mature style in which her highly atmospheric paintings are built from anonymous, intimate images, appearing like memories frozen in time.

Her work has won her international acclaim with work hanging in the collection of British Airways, Nike, Levi Strauss, Heineken, Canary Wharf, the Forte Group, SAP as well as major private collections worldwide.

Olivia Musgrave was born in Dublin in 1958, her father Irish and her mother Greek. She studied sculpture a the City & Guilds of London under Allan Sly. Her work is drawn both from life and from the imagination where she draws inspiration from Greek mythology, as well as influences from 20th Century Italian sculptors, including Marini, Martini, Greco and Manzu. Alongside her personal work, she has completed a number of portrait and public commissions in bronze. She is a Fellow the Royal Society of British Sculptors and former President of the Society of Portrait Sculptors.

For 30 years, she has painted the landscape surrounding her childhood home on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal—a home she left after the death of her father, but to which she returns every month. These paintings explore themes of exile and belonging and reflect the memories and friendships that have sustained her work, allowing her to find her unique voice as a painter. Denaro was trained at Central School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. She has shown regularly with the John Martin Gallery since 2002 and with the Taylor Gallery in Dublin.

 

Robert Kime, a friend and collector of Denaro's paintings, wrote: "Whether Melita Denaro is watching a squally cloud, filled with water, change colour as it merges with the sea, or a sunbeam illuminating a golden cow in a green corner of a meadow, she brings a spiritual intensity to her paintings akin to the translucent Scapa Flow sunsets of Turner, or the transformative light in a Tiepolo painting, where a kneeling woman is bathed in a shaft of sunlight and becomes the Queen of Heaven. Always, we are given a personal, passionate, and thrilling vision of the sublime fusion that occurs in every moment when Heaven meets and transforms the earth."