Leo Fitzmaurice: CONDO 2018

13 January - 10 February 2018

Co-hosting with Arcadia Missa (London):
Galeria Stereo (Warsaw)
Galeria Dawid Radziszewski (Warsaw)

http://www.condocomplex.org/london/

 

For Condo 2018 The Sunday Painter is pleased to present Post Match, a series of over 500 works by Leo Fitzmaurice, started in 1996 and completed in 2017.

 

Leo Fitzmaurice’s work starts with an observation. Invariably his observations centre on the everyday – things so common that they are often completely overlooked. Spending time with these observations (sometimes many years) he waits for them to ‘suggest a way forward’.

 

Post Match is such a work – and from the initial observation of a flattened cigarette packet in the street the artist has developed an accumulating response. From noticing one day that the design and layout of a cigarette packet lid mimics that of a sports top he has gone on to develop this observation into an ever expanding work that lies somewhere between sculpture, craft and the activity of collecting. The work, although artist made, and having been ‘in construction’ for two decades, is, in its production, akin to an activity carried on outside of the studio, running in parallel to his broader practice.

 

Despite all of this, or because of it, the work retains an odd sense of relevance, and speaks of our culture’s burgeoning consumption of entertainment. Furthermore in the light of a ban on all cigarette branding, the work becomes a topographic archive of international design. These temporarily personal objects, rescued from the ongoing downward flow of detritus-to-be, mark moments, great and small, now lost.

 

Leo Fitzmaurice b. 1963 Newport, England. Lives and works in Merseyside. In 2018 he will have a solo exhibition at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Previous solo exhibitions include: As Yet, Caustic Coastal, Manchester, UK, 2017, OH V HO, The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2016, Frieze London Sculpture Park, 2015, /|\, The Sunday Painter, London 2014, Blank Stir, The Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, UK, 2012, You Try to Tell Me But I never Listen, New Art Gallery Walsall, 2011, Sometimes the Things You Touch Come True, Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2007, Neat Stuff , First-site Colchester 2005. Previous group exhibitions include Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, 2016, Reader, Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, 2016, Edit/Undo, Space In Between, London, 2015, DATA (curated by Shiri Shalmy), Contemporary Art Society, London, 2014, Easy Does It (Curated by Kevin Hunt), David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 2014, Chain Chain Chain (curated by Glenn Adamson), Bischo Weiss, London, 2012, The way we do art now, curated by Pavel Buchler, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, 2010, Flyers agsheepself, Seventeen Gallery, London, 2010. Fitzmaurice was the recipient of the 5th Northern Art Prize in 2012. Fitzmaurice’s work is in the Arts Council Collection of England, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Manchester Art Gallery, The Royal London Hospital (Vital Arts), The Locus Plus Archive and numerous private collections.