Image: Art & Horse Racing Gallery, Newmarket
Art & Horse Racing Gallery has announced Sydney-based Australian artist and architect James McGrath as the latest addition to its stable of artists. The Newmarket gallery introduced McGrath through its August newsletter and a feature on the 49th episode of the ‘Vantage Point Racing Club’ podcast, where he discusses his practice, his architectural background and work currently available through the gallery.
McGrath works across traditional painting, architecture and digital media. According to his gallery profile, he has developed his practice over more than 25 years and has held more than 20 solo exhibitions. His work has been shown digitally at The Lume, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the J. Paul Getty Museum, linking his painted imagery to questions of spatial construction and technologically mediated display.
The gallery describes McGrath’s visual language as marked by a Baroque theatricality. His practice brings together references to 16th-century libraries, Dutch still life and environmental data. The newsletter further describes a group of scenes constructed as three-dimensional theatre sets, drawing on the ‘teatrini’ associated with Tintoretto and Poussin. Three-dimensional scans of real horses are staged for light and depth, then combined by hand with high-resolution photographs of the artist’s studio canvases and historic landscapes drawn from museum archives.
A recurring horse occupies the central role in the works shown in the newsletter, including ‘The Pretender’, ‘The Patron’, ‘The Heir’ and ‘The Duchess’. The riders are presented as vacant or hollow garments rather than fully rendered figures. In ‘The Heir’, the horse is described as the only figure in the suite with a future, while ‘The Duchess’ uses rank, marriage and clothing as elements of a portrait whose human subject has disappeared. The material establishes a sustained relationship between equestrian imagery, inherited authority and theatrical staging without reducing the scenes to conventional sporting pictures.
The gallery is also listing McGrath’s ‘Heron and Books’ (2026), an oil painting on canvas measuring 80 by 120 centimetres and priced at £3,950. The work places a heron within a rigid architectural grid of books and shelves. The gallery’s description sets the archived volumes, which claim to preserve fixed historical knowledge, against the bird as a living fiction inserted into that setting. It is the work identified on McGrath’s artist page as currently available through Art & Horse Racing Gallery.
Art & Horse Racing Gallery is based at Saint Wendred’s on Hamilton Road in Newmarket and describes itself as combining the training of racehorses with the presentation of fine art. Its programme includes artists working across traditional and contemporary approaches, as well as painting and sculpture. McGrath’s profile appears alongside those of artists including Jacqueline Stanhope and Marco Ramasso, whose practices address equestrian subjects, animals and the natural world from different positions. The gallery is open daily from 10am to 6pm by appointment, with visitors asked to phone ahead.
