Justin Fitzpatrick

b. 1985, Dublin, Ireland

2013-2015 MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London

Recent exhibitions

Solo Shows:
2014 ‘SEXT’, Hockney Gallery, RCA, London

Group shows:
2014 ‘London Gay Pride 2014: Freedom to...,’ Take me Home Projects, London
2012 Salon Art Prize, Matt Roberts Arts, London

Awards and Residencies:
2015 Troytown Art Pottery Residency, London
2014 Royal College of Art Secret Bursary, Royal College of Art, London

Artist’s Statement

I like the idea of a completely uncensored way of producing, where any and every idea, thought or image that arises from inside is ‘pissed’ out in a steady stream. To ‘piss’ out art is also an attempt to break down my canonised and internalised ideas of a ‘good’ subject for figurative art. Every idea comes out, not just the ones that I place value on. This is an attempt to enact a kind of 'base materialism', a de-stratified mode of production, which allows for contrasting modes of address to sit together and to be regarded equally: fluency and ham-fistedness, idiocy and intellectualism, clarity and opacity, sincerity and irony.

Because of the excessive mode of production, the studio becomes filled, cluttered with sketches, paintings, photos and sculptures. I have to live with, to be responsible for all the things that came out of me. I start to question them, and in this questioning and wanting to understand, a looping structure is initiated. There is a kind of Jungian movement of self-individuation, re-ingesting the excreted material, like an Ouroboros eating it’s own tail. The studio becomes a kind of soup of ego, where works bleed into each other, new combinations emerge and a heuristic ordering and re- arrangement of material happens.

The works selected for New Contemporaries have a formal starting point in common, that of biomorphic folding fabric. I was interested in the material quality of the fabric, and as I followed these interests specific narratives developed for each of the works.