Michael Fitzharris was born in Limerick in 1952. He studied at the Limerick School of Art and undertook post-graduate studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Berlin, GERMANY. He now lives and works in Malaga, SPAIN. He is a member of the Andalusian International Artists.
He has held many solo shows in Ireland, in Dublin since 1990. Outside of Dublin, he has also held solo shows in Limerick, Wexford, Cork, and Belfast. In 1992, he held a solo exhibition at Galerie Alexandre, Paris, FRANCE.
He has had two-person shows with Mary P. O’Connor, Elizabeth LeJeune, Samuel Walsh, Bob Quinn, and Aidan Bradley.
He has exhibited in open and invited group exhibitions held in Ireland. In particular, he has been a regular exhibitor at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Since 2015, he has regularly shown in several group exhibitions in the Malaga area of Andalucía, Spain and has shown in many other group shows in Ireland. He has represented Ireland at exhibitions in Wales, Belgium, Canada, France, Slovenia, N. Ireland, Taiwan, and England
He has received many national awards and grants and his work is represented in national and private collections throughout Ireland.
‘The platform for his work is landscape but that is too easy a statement and too limiting a description. Fitzharris is not necessarily interested in the picturesque but responds more to the scrubland, the ignored places, the old and the worn in both geography and object. This accounts for the occasional scratch and attack mark you find in his paintings. Paint is put down but it is also taken off, torn away, removed and scarred. This is/was called ‘scumbling’ and goes back as far as the Italian Renaissance but in the hands of contemporary painters, it creates action, activity and linear markings. It’s a kind of drawing but also a dividing technique that splits colour into sections and makes form. Landscape and object are still there but they are there as subject matter and are historicised through the hand of the painter’.
‘Scrubland with Pines’
Oil on board
31x36cms
2018
€2000
