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Fenton Art Gallery: Mary FitzGerald - Afterlife
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Artist : Mary FitzGerald
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'Afterlife' Art Exhibition Ireland
23rd May - 13th June
The Fenton Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by Mary FitzGerald since the mid 1990s. This much anticipated show will be accompanied by a publication by Four Courts Press entitled 'Afterlife'
“The accumulating sense of elemental violence, catastrophe and mortality conjured by the titles of this new series of paintings by Mary FitzGerald (such as Tsunami and Eruption) may surprise those familiar with her earlier works. It is not as though her work has not been concerned, from the very beginning, with questions of vulnerability, even death. FitzGerald has always worked with materials which have a certain fragility and has said that 'as all experience is qualified by the inevitability of the end, most art, and certainly mine, has a fundamental concern with death.' Nevertheless, through the 1980s and into the early 1990s her work was largely characterized by an elegant austerity and a calm, self-sufficient stillness.”
“ Intimations of frailty and damage, injury and repair became evident in her work in the late 80's and early 90's; derived to a significant degree from serious injuries to her spine suffered by FitzGerald in a car accident in 1986. Complications arising from this incident eventually led, by the mid-1990s, to a decade-long period of withdrawal, silence and artistic inactivity, the chrysalis state from which she has just lately re-emerged. Some sense of the enforced suppression of creative drives, as well as the sense of isolation and dependence, which surely characterized this period of hiatus, is bleakly reflected in the blighted off-white surfaces in five of these latest paintings, individually encased in their transparent Perspex frames.”
(above are extracts from Caoimhin Mac Giolla Léith’s essay commissioned for the publication.)
Though based in Dublin, Mary has had significant past artistic connections with Cork, which is why she chose the Fenton Gallery as her venue on this important occasion. In 1991, the Crawford Municipal Gallery in Cork acquired a major piece of her work from the Oliver Dowling Gallery and a year later commissioned her to make an installation Orientations for its Japan Festival. This suite of paintings was subsequently purchased by IMMA. Her work is represented in many public and private collections, both here and abroad. After graduating from NCAD, she studied and exhibited in Japan between 1979 and 1981. She held numerous solo exhibitions in Ireland, Europe and the USA and has participated in group exhibitions worldwide. She has represented Ireland at ROSC, L‘Imaginaire Irlandais and the XVIII Bienal de Sao Paulo. In 1990 she was elected a member of Aosdána.
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Blizzard
Oil, acupuncture needles, collaged drawing, photograph and rice on canvas under Perspex,
93 x 93cm
€5,500
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