Artist: Justin Fitzpatrick

Kerlin Gallery presents A Musical Instrument, the first solo exhibition in Ireland by Justin Fitzpatrick.

In Fitzpatrick’s paintings, figurative forms appear enmeshed within complex systems of processes, sounds, memories, and ideas. Bodies morph into musical and mechanical apparatus, while objects become animated or anthropomorphic. In one painting, a human heart is swapped for a glass armonica, an 18th-century instrument with melancholic tones once thought to induce madness. In another, a masked figure plucks at the strings of a suspension bridge, becoming a self-playing Aeolian harp.

The title A Musical Instrument references a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the pagan god Pan transforms a reed from the riverbed into a panpipe, not knowing the pain caused by ‘Making a poet out of a man’. Music-playing, and by extension, all creative expression, is positioned as something mediumistic, involuntary, and yet also a source of struggle. In Fitzpatrick’s paintings, however, it also appears to foster a kind of connectivity: spines become injected with musical notes; bodies seem to communicate through diagrammatic wave particles; tangled webs of veins, nerves, and arteries imply a porosity of self, a consciousness that expands beyond our physical bodies.

JUSTIN FITZPATRICK
b. 1985, Dublin, Ireland

Born in Dublin, Fitzpatrick studied in London (St Oswald’s School of Painting; the Royal College of Art) and is now based in Montargis, France. Fitzpatrick’s recent solo exhibitions include Ballotta, Centre d’art contemporain de La Ferme du Buisson, Greater Paris (2024) and Alpha Salad, The Tetley, Leeds (2023) alongside solo exhibitions at galleries including Seventeen, London; Sultana, Paris; and Margot Samel, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Arcanes, Rituels et Chimères, FRAC Corsica (2024).