Justin Fitzpatrick, A Musical Instrument, 2024, oil on linen, oak frame, 183 x 143 cm framed. Image courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery

24th October 2024 – Exhibition

A Musical Instrument is the first solo exhibition in Ireland by Justin Fitzpatrick, a young Irish artist based in France.

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.

FROM

Born in 1985 in Dublin, Ireland, Justin Fitzpatrick attended St. Oswald’s School of Painting in London from 2004–2007 and earned his MA in Fine Art Painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2015. He has exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and Europe, and participated in recent shows in New York and Mexico. Fitzpatrick had his first solo institutional exhibition, Alpha Salad, at The Tetley, Leeds in 2022. On 17 March 2024, his first institutional solo exhibition in France, Ballotta, opened at La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, near Paris (until 28 July).