Patrick Michael Fitzgerald was born in Ireland in 1965. He received his BA and MA in Fine Art from Chelsea School of Art, London and now lives and works in Bilbao, Spain. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at the Ciudadela de Pamplona - Pabellón de Mixtos, Pamplona and Museo Gustavo de Maeztu both in Spain, 2007 and a solo exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2008. He was included in the survey of contemporary painting ‘Painting in the Noughties’ at the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Ireland, 2007 and ‘In and out of geometry’ at Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, 2007. Awards include a residency at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, USA in 2004. Fitzgerald is represented in the collections of The Irish Museum of Modern Art; the Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo; the Colección de Arte Contemporáneo Ayuntamiento de Pamplona, Spain and many other collections in Ireland and Europe.

The paintings of Patrick Michael Fitzgerald are mostly intimate and modest in scale and though aware of the inherent fragility of painting in the 21st century, he pursues ambitiously the specific attributes of the medium; exploring immediacy, colour, light, time and the infinite density or pure emptiness of things. This reveals an underlying concern with phenomenological questions. Often with a great economy of means he employs very direct approaches to making meticulously calibrated paintings which bring them very close to the spirit of drawing. Indeed, for him, there is no hierarchy in his practice and the activities of drawing and painting merge. The reference to everyday things and fragmentary experiences (how things feel); the corner of a room, a tree through a window, the structure of a crane against the sky, reflections in a window or shadows on a wall are evidence that for him all representation is, in reality, abstraction. His approach transforms the world into the self-contained and lawless energies of painting and, as Enrique Juncosa recently wrote; “present all their entangled elements as a kind of psychic entity”. The specificity and uniqueness of each painting or drawing, generates through a dynamic of contrast, a rich dialogue when they are presented together as an installation. This has recently become another important facet of his practice; the composing of groups of works in a space while maintaining the individual identity of each one.

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