Robert Fitzmaurice grew up in Coventry, where contrasts between the old and new cathedrals, the history of the blitz and his father's accounts of being a prisoner of war influenced his young imagination. After studying Fine Art in Sunderland he took a studio with Sunderland Artists Group for a year before moving south to take his MFA at Reading University.
Early encounters with the painters John Emanuel and Adrian Heath turned into long term friendships, and their insights into material processes and approaches to abstraction have served as important touchpoints in his own studio practice.
Invention and abstraction of the figure characterises his output. His main discipline is painting but he regularly turns to other media, especially printmaking and sculpture to consider how art can be created and interpreted. He summarises his practice as “working to conjure a presence”.
I view the many stories we have invented to explain our place in the universe to be a profound mixture of the beautiful, the bewildering and the absurd. My paintings, prints and ceramics give these ideas form through matrices of figurative and abstract elements.
Robert says "I am very interested in how the figure has been represented across cultures and time, especially when the figure appears to the viewer in a frontal stance. I am drawn to instances in medieval and Asian art, as well as 20th century culture. Some kind of encounter is implied that gives me a framework for exploring the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer."
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