ABOUT
Biography
In Robert Fitzmaurice’s work abstracted figures emerge from grids of vibrant colour. His main discipline is painting but he regularly turns to other media, especially printmaking and sculpture to consider how art can be created and interpreted. He summarises his practice as “working to conjure a presence”.
He grew up in Coventry, where contrasts between the old and new cathedrals, the history of the blitz and his father's accounts of being a prisoner of war influenced his young imagination. After studying Fine Art at Sunderland he took a studio with Sunderland Artists Group for a year before moving to Reading to take his MFA. Early encounters with the painters John Emanuel and Adrian Heath went on to become lasting friendships and their insights into materials, processes and approaches to abstraction have proved important touchpoints in his own studio practice.
Selected group exhibitions include Whitworth Young Contemporaries, Manchester; International Print Center, New York; NN Contemporary, Northampton; and APT Gallery, London. Solo exhibitions include 'Artist of the Day,' Angela Flowers Gallery, London; 'No Eden' Greenham Control Tower, Newbury; and 'No Sudden Moves', West Berkshire Museum.
He lives and works full-time on his art in Reading, Berkshire.
Statement
I make paintings, prints and ceramics that balance figurative and abstract elements using vibrant colour relationships. I am very interested in the art of the past, especially medieval and Indian art, whenever the figure appears to the viewer in a frontal stance. Some kind of encounter is implied and this gives me a framework to explore in contemporary terms the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer.
I tend towards small scale works that combine flat forms and irregular grids of contrasting colours to conjure a presence. Each work evolves over weeks or months and I think this slow process also requires the viewer to invest time to look and look again. My compositions can be thought of as visual concoctions that layer references in an emblematic manner, contrasting flatness and three dimensionality, surface and illusion, to compound meaning. My starting point may be visual or literary; enduring influences include Spanish Romanesque painting and the poetry and prose of Borges and Lorca.
I find the many stories we have invented to explain the universe and our place within it to be a profound mixture of the beautiful, the bewildering and the absurd. Across different cultures there are many touchpoints divided by meaning. Today, in our globally connected world, this paradox makes singular interpretations impossible, even if this was the artist's original intent. These conditions create a sense of constraint and liberation, a set of parameters for me to work with, and for the viewer to meet with on their own terms.