Painting architecture: Tommy Fitzpatrick’s fractured modernist visions
Painting architecture: Tommy Fitzpatrick’s fractured modernist visions
Tommy Fitzpatrick’s new series of electric-hued architectural paintings capture the American artist’s 30-year fascination with modernism
Tommy Fitzpatrick,
Complex, 2021
Tommy Fitzpatrick has long had a fascination with how buildings are made. Growing up in the Dallas suburbs, the downtown urban environment became a magnet. ‘I’ve always liked modernism and Bauhaus, and found that urban areas had a similar quality of newness and futurism,’ he tells Wallpaper*.
An exhibition of new paintings, titled ‘Site’, at Qualia Contemporary Art in Palo Alto, California, marks a departure in Fitzpatrick’s conventional approach: instead of painting from life or photographs, he turned to computer-aided design (CAD) software to create renderings that he then translated into paint. ‘When it comes to architecture, I often find myself loving the renderings more than buildings themselves; they’re a proposition of the fact,’ he explains.