Tommy Fitzpatrick (born 1969, Dallas, TX) works from models—either handmade and photographed or constructed digitally—to make his paintings, which hold a careful balance between abstraction and representation. Working from these models, he translates volume, perspective and light into hard-edged pattern, pairing a geometric articulation of space with an insistence on painted surface and a careful attention to color. This contradiction between flat pattern and illusionistic depth is the terrain Fitzpatrick has been exploring with increasing sophistication for decades.
Tommy Fitzpatrick earned his BA from The University of Texas at Austin in 1991 and his MFA from Yale University in 1993. He has exhibited his work in 20 solo exhibitions, including Crystal Cities, Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas (2017); CITY FACES, Michael Schultz Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2010); and Geometry in Reflection: Tommy Fitzpatrick and Margo Sawyer, The Gallery at the University of Texas at Arlington (2009). In 2004-05 the exhibition Object Lessons: a Survey of Work from 1997-2004, organized by the Galveston Arts Center, traveled to the Arlington Museum of Art. A companion exhibition, Observations: 1997-2004, was on view at Charles Cowles Gallery, New York. Fitzpatrick's paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. He is Professor of Painting at Texas State University in San Marcos. Fitzpatrick lives in San Antonio, TX.