Michael Muir: Unplugged

The works of Scottish-born, Sydney-based artist Michael Muir occupy a space where familiarity is spun into something gently estranged. Drawing on landscape, architecture and the figure, his paintings for over two decades have rendered recognisable scenes in a quiet unreality – flattened, heightened, held in suspension. Built through careful accretion and revision, each image feels tightly choreographed yet slightly out of sync with itself, as if reality has been slowed down and re-staged. In his new suite of paintings, ‘Unplugged’, this sense of temporal and perceptual drift is hedged with ideas of withdrawal, and reconnection.

Muir is often positioned within a generation of painters who re-engage abstraction not as a purely formal exercise, but as something contingent – tied to lived experience, spatial awareness, and the instability of images in a post-digital world. In ‘Unplugged’, this tendency is sharpened into a desire, as the artist describes it, to “step away from technology, try to reconnect to people and nature, and enjoy pauses.” What it means to be unplugged, Muir suggests, sits somewhere between disconnection and return. Stylised forms and warm, nostalgic hues show Muir tuning into his surroundings – here, it’s the landscapes of Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs – and dialling down the noise; of the world, of the screen, and of the machine. What remains are dreamlike vistas distilled into a buoyant, surreal register – where faceless figures drift through velvet fields of candy pink and blue, acid green and cream-soft yellow.

His restraint in pictorial detail is counterbalanced by Muir’s material approach to paint – where texture & tactility take the lead. “I had a conscious plan many years ago to pare my work back to abstract flat shapes,” Muir reflects. “This was a deliberate reset. Since then, I’ve been slowly adding more colour, depth and texture, staying true to my interpretation of the world.” Working primarily with a palette knife, he drags and deposits thick passages of pigment across the surface, creating forms that feel more built than painted. Edges sharpen under pressure, and paint sits with physical insistence as if assembled from solidified movement. Across each canvas, marks shift like slow tectonic plates – reconfiguring space while holding it in place. In de-pixelating and de-noising his high-key surfaces, Muir channels his ongoing interest in how painting operates in an age saturated with fast images. His compositions feel arrived at slowly, rather than declared, inviting a kind of prolonged looking.

Muir’s paintings are cinematic – not in narrative terms, but in atmosphere. There is a sense of mise-en-scène, with staged figures, silent and still, like actors paused just before a scene begins. Within his carefully composed worlds, hues are impossibly harmonious, landscapes are always sun-drenched, and pastel skies glow like painted backdrops holding clouds that hover with a suspended, almost artificial weight. Yet beneath this constructed calm, there’s a tacit tension, the suggestion that beyond the picture plane lies reality in all its messiness and discordance, looming just out of reach.

Within Muir’s profound sensitivity to surface, space is subtly unsettled. Overlapping planes, shifts in scale, and competing visual cues compress and loosen perspective at once, so that foreground and background slip into one another. This instability resonates with Muir’s own way of seeing landscape, shaped by movement and travel. “I realised over time,” he notes, “that my approach to finding subject matter relates back to my personal experience of shifting homes and countries at a young age.”

In ‘Unplugged’, Muir arrives at a kind of quiet withdrawal – not an escape from the world, but a loosening of its signal. Here, landscape, memory and image are gently untethered, allowed to drift into a softer space where attention moves more slowly, more deliberately. To be “unplugged,” in this sense, is not to disappear, but to be returned – to worlds still switched on yet no longer rushing, and to oneself, deep beneath the noise.

Elli Walsh 

Principle Writer – Artist Profile