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Robert Fitzmaurice

Reading
Robert Fitzmaurice grew up in Coventry. Since 1984 he lives and works in Reading, Berkshire where he makes paintings, prints and sculptures that reflect his interest in combining figurative conventions with abstraction and historical sources.
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I view the many stories we have invented to explain our place in the universe to be a profound mixture of the beautiful, the bewildering and the absurd. My paintings, prints and ceramics give these ideas form through matrices of figurative and abstract elements. 

I am very interested in how the figure has been represented across cultures and time, especially when the figure appears to the viewer in a frontal stance. I am drawn to instances in medieval and Asian art, as well as 20th century culture. Some kind of encounter is implied that gives me a framework for exploring the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer. 

By layering my references in an emblematic manner, and contrasting flatness with three dimensionality, new compound meanings emerge. Across different cultures I find there are many touchpoints which are separated by meaning yet in our globally connected, image-saturated world, singular interpretations are impossible, even if this was the artist's original intent. 

These conditions, which operate between constraint and liberation, provide me with a rich set of parameters to work with and for the viewer to meet with on their own terms.

Lived Experience

Robert Fitzmaurice 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 in Sunderland he took a studio with Sunderland Artists Group for a year before moving south to take his MFA at Reading University. 

Early encounters with the painters John Emanuel and Adrian Heath turned into long term friendships, and their insights into material processes and approaches to abstraction have served as important touchpoints in his own studio practice.

Invention and abstraction of the figure characterises his output. 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”.

Selected group exhibitions include Whitworth Young Contemporaries, Manchester; NN Contemporary, Northampton; Creekside, APT Gallery, London, and LichtundFire, New York City. 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.

 

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