Artists

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald (1965) is an Irish artist who lives and works in Vizcaya, Spain.

His art education was at Chelsea School of Art in London where he gained both his B.A. (1987) and M.A. (1988) in Fine Art Painting.

He has exhibited widely in Europe and elsewhere. His work is represented in important collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; O.P.W. (The Irish State Collection); ARTIUM – Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria, Spain and the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, USA, amongst others.

Fitzgerald’s paintings are a response to things that surround him in his daily life while also being exploratory and a reflection on the history of the medium itself and its possibilities. He is also influenced by other art forms such as music, poetry, literature and cinema. For him, painting is not just a visual phenomenon but is also a bodily and haptic experience. The material density of his works as painted objects, contrasts with different kinds of ambiguous images where the difference between abstraction and representation is blurred and unclear. Over the years, different, contrasting family groups of paintings have evolved which explore different qualities, procedures and images. Though his works have an economy of means and are usually modest in size, Fitzgerald seeks a certain kind of intensity and reflective experience which is built up slowly over time. A state of affairs exists in his paintings and drawings where it is not clear if everything is collapsing and falling apart or, on the contrary, forming and coming together. Combining organic and constructed elements, these intermediate, transitional domains are what give his paintings their tension and dynamics