Gallery 30 South will be featuring multidisciplinary illustrator Barry Fitzgerald’s solo exhibition entitled “Interrupted” for the month of January.
Fitzgerald will be at the exhibit for an artist’s reception on Friday, January 7, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. and to speak about his works, according to Matt Kennedy, owner and director of Gallery 30 South.
Those who want to go to the artist reception should RSVP before attending the event to ensure that the space will not be too crowded and social distancing is possible. For more information visit: https://gallery30south.com
Fitzgerald is a Professor of Illustration at the University of Kansas. He has been teaching illustration, drawing, painting, and conceptual problem solving since 1993. As a visual communicator, he loves the challenge of making images that engage intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically.
A member of the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, as well as the Society of Illustrators of New York, Fitzgerald was considered one of the 200 best illustrators in the world by magazine Lürzer’s Archive.
Throughout his career, he has received over 100 national and international awards for his work. His images have been in over 60 juried and invitational exhibitions, including shows in New York, Los Angeles, and London. His clients include The New York Times, Playboy Jazz Festival, Vagrant Records, McGraw-Hill Publishing and Washington Post.
Fitzgerald’s exhibition “Interrupted” primarily features houses on stilts as a metaphor for the state of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Houses on stilts have been showing up in my sketchbooks. I never knew what they represented, I just knew I liked the way they looked. I found the contrast of something large being supported by something small to be curious and pleasing.”
“The state of the world over the last year and a half gave these structures new meaning. The buildings became substitutes for people because the homes were the places that people never left. They were comforting, but also isolating. Our day-to-day, our collective way of life, was put on hold. Interrupted. These works address some of the effects of being interrupted,” Fitzgerald said in a statement to the Gallery 30 South.
Kennedy praised Fitzgerald’s use of architecture and mountains in his pieces and how he used art to represent the feeling of anxiety and longing for hope amid the pandemic.
“The paintings in this exhibition are a great, almost emblematic representation of that ideal and yet they’re also all on stilts. And so there’s something sort of anxious about that as well.”
“So I think when you take just those two aspects of the majority of the pieces, you’re struck by the calmness in his color palette that sort of masked to a degree the types of anxieties we’ve all experienced and the types of comfort we’re all hoping for. And I think that that’s really apparent in absolutely every single piece in this show.”
“There’s something that feels kind of old, tiny and kind of fresh about his work. And I think that it speaks to people of all ages and all generations, all ethnic backgrounds. It discriminates against nobody of course, but I think you can find things in the work that will speak to your own specific upbringing and your own specific ideas about the world.”
Fitzgerald’s artworks will be featured by Gallery 30 South, located at 30 South Wilson Avenue from 12:00- 6:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, from January 4 until January 28, according to Kennedy.
