New wall-based and sculptural works from the Berlin-based artist.

“It’s hard to feel real these days, so I don’t bother really. I like transitory places. Places devoid of history, sentimentality, belonging, pure and without shame, totally self-identical with their surface presentation.

In the works I try to avoid faux expression and phony depth. It creeps in sometimes. I think of them as ciphers or props, although whose referents are on equally precarious ontological ground. I want them to seem effortless ,so they’re not bogged down, but light, more like air, or tears, or empty boxes. I never manage.

I read, “The great question used to be ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Today, the real question is `Why is there nothing rather than something?’ “[1] I like that. Less pressure.

A recent experience in a Le Cafe Lacoste, situated within a small Lacoste boutique in the city; profound/relevant here. The only pretences (barely concealed) were the faux nostalgic decor elements. Besides that, total freedom. An off-piste oasis uncontaminated by messy reality/past. The coffee was alright, the boy barista sweet and charming. It was really deserted. Here, in places like this, your sadness is not your own, but sometimes in the place itself, and you can walk into the sadness, and walk back out.[2]

Galleries are like this too. Neutral. Pure. (Windowless). Safe space?

Someone said to me once that they were trying to make a painting they, or someone else, could actually live with; in their home I presumed. I’ve thought about this a lot. I wanted that too. However, the next question was, what kind of home? What kind of living? It turned into a bigger problem than I had bargained for, a crisis even. I guess these works are, provisionally, what I could settle for.”

– Glenn Fitzgerald

Glenn Fitzgerald is an artist based between Tipperary and Berlin and completed a BA Painting, Cork and MFA Painting, NCAD.  His output includes print, painting, collage, sculpture, installation, sound and text. In his work he reckons with/reflects ideas around precarity, challenges to meaning, truths and reality in western societies, issues of class, trauma, neurodiversity and queerness, hegemonies and regimes of presentation in art and the art market, challenges to the status of (fine) art itself as a distinct category of cultural production and subjectivation through capital/state/media apparatuses. Concepts are communicated with an emphasis on specific materialities and appropriated methodologies and aesthetics, informed by personal experiences and theory. Solo exhibitions include: Gappy Being, Source Arts Centre, Thurles 2019, We Don’t Dream, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2003. Group exhibitions include: Front/Backs, The Complex, Dublin, 2023, Ortstermin 22, Berlin, 2022, Vision X, RHA, Dublin 2019 and Display, Link and Cure, The Complex, Dublin, 2019 amongst others.

Instagram @glennhfitzgerald.  #luckycharms

[1] Baudrillard, Jean, The Perfect Crime, (Verso, 2020)

[2] Paraphrasing a line by John Moriarty in conversation with Tommy Tiernan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6kfo4FahM0&ab_channel=jambonsambo