Carol Huston analyses the recent announcement of Leo Fitzmaurice as the 2011 Northern Art Prize winner.
Northern Art Prize 2011. Leo Fitzmaurice. Photo David Lindsay
As announced at Leeds Art Gallery, the fifth winner of the Northern Art Prize was Shropshire-born artist Leo Fitzmaurice (born 1963). Besides pronouncing the fact that painting is repeatedly shunned by art judges generally, perhaps the appeal of Fitzmaurice’s work for the prize was its deconstruction of the everyday as part of a greater British legacy which embraces the mundane. Fitzmaurice both used this approach within an institutional context – reworking a gallery space- as well as with the external world – through stills of quotidien urban life.
Since the prize was given to an artist who rethinks the ordinary, perhaps this indicates the North’s regional taste for the familar. Or, perhaps if we may consider the North of England as a burgeoning centre for contemporary British art- the appeal of Fitzmaurice to the panel of judges is that his work recalls a legacy of early to mid- twentieth century idiosyncratically British art.
Northern Art Prize 2011, Leo Fitzmaurice. Photo David Lindsay
Namely, coming to mind is the work of the British Surrealists of the 1930s whose works emphasised landscapes and the Independent Group of the 1950s who reenvisioned the influx of a new postwar media landscape. For example, Independent Group photographer Nigel Henderson captured ordinary urban scenes of Bethnal Green in a postwar East London. Further to a reworking of the everyday, Fitzmaurice’s selected works from the Leeds Art Gallery’s collection focus on landscape – which too was a predominant preoccupation for the British strand of Surrealism.
The Way Things Appear. Leo Fitzmaurice
The most simultaneously retrospective and contemporary aspect, however, of Fitzmaurice’s exhibition was his digital slide presentation The Way Things Appear. This series of photographic stills – taken with the artist’s mobile phone- recalls Paolozzi’s 1952 BUNK presentation to a live audience of collaged magazine cut-outs using an overhead projector.
Other nominees for the prize included abstract painter James Hugonin, who is featured in Corridor8 issue 3 part 1, Richard Rigg, who was nominated as the public’s winner, and Liadin Cooke who uses natural materials to create organic works.
The Northern Art Prize exhibition continues at Leeds Art Gallery until 19 February 2012.
Published 04.02.2012 by Bryony Bond
400 words