Patrick Fitzgerald

"Neapolitan Car, " Mixed-Media Sculpture

2021

The sculptures and paintings of Chicago-based artist Patrick Fitzgerald are about personal nostalgia, memory, and the beauty he finds in his urban environment. He refers to his body of work as his “Neighborhood of Infinity,” a borrowed term used literally to describe the bounty of materials and creative inspiration he found in the industrial landscapes of his youth. For the last decade, Fitzgerald has been mining his early experiences, re-envisioning the mechanical world of his childhood through the eye of an artist. Born from a fascination with the soap box derby cars of his youth, Fitzgerald constructs miniature soap box cars and the branded attire of their imagined drivers. He builds primarily with found materials - wood, wires, tubing, screen, fabric and collage. The real work involves the finishes: the hand lettering, stages of varying color paint coats, and surface treatments. He always leaves traces of changes or repairs made to a work, adding to the history and evolution of each piece. Futuristic forms imbued with history, each sculpture is an exercise in imagining the future through the lens of the past – or vice versa.