Ex Libris — from the books of — brings together a new body of work in which McGrath fuses the grandeur of the Baroque still life with the quiet accumulations of the archive. Shelves of ancient vellum volumes erupt with flowers painted in the tradition of Rachel Ruysch; rare birds inhabit libraries; knowledge and nature press against one another with equal insistence. These are paintings about what we preserve, what we lose, and the riotous beauty that grows in the gap between the two.