James McGrath

Over the last ten years, McGrath has exhibited in New York City, London, Hong Kong, Sydney and Paris.

Son of art critic Sandra McGrath and banker Michael Anthony (Tony) McGrath, after graduating high school, James travelled to Paris to study the techniques and principles of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century masters under the guidance of artist Patrick Betaudier. Upon returning to Australia, McGrath began work as a studio assistant to Arthur Boyd. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of New South Wales. During this period as an architect, McGrath discovered that Baroque techniques enabled him to connect architecture and art by filling the void space within the CAD (Computer-Aided Design) modelling with narrative. "It occurred to me too, that while you’re on a computer, you are looking through the same perspective window into a 3-D world that Renaissance perspective artists tried to do." In 2010, he was granted special access to the Strahov Baroque Monastic Library in Prague. Set within this notable historic building, the monastery's libraries hold over 125,000 volumes of philosophical and theological texts which McGrath used as inspiration for his body of work Ex Libris. He was quoted in an article by The Australian Financial Review that his twin daughters motivated him to create the work; "I realised my children were not going to have a library like mine, so I painted them one."

• Olsen Irwin Gallery • Maitland Regional Art Gallery • Artereal Gallery • Sculpture by the Sea • Carriageworks • Michael Carr Art Gallery • Queensland Museum of Modern Art • Queen Street Fine Art Gallery • Gibsone Jessop Gallery, Toronto • The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong • Nevill Keating Gallery, London • MCG Galleries, New York • J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles • Laguna Art Museum in Los Angeles.

James McGrath is recorded with the occupation architect. Recorded as a citizen of Australia.