David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Margaret Fitzgerald’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Refuge. This suite of new paintings, all created in 2017, are a continuation of her active and dynamic compositions, holding juxtapositions in tension with one another on their painted surfaces. Like her earlier works, these paintings seek to reveal the elusive and inarticulate, the underbelly, the in-between, the bridge between the natural world and those who inhabit it. Yet, these new works evolve further, capturing an urgent sense of contemporaneity. The show’s title, Refuge, named after a painting on display, captures this sense of socio-political unease. Through her painterly mark making, raw textured surface, large fields of color, and calligraphic details, Fitzgerald creates contemplative gestural abstractions with an emotional resonance.

Refuge will be on view from December 15, 2017 through January 20, 2018 with an opening reception on Friday, December 15, 2017 from 5:00 – 7:00 pm at David Richard Gallery’s new Santa Fe location at 1570 Pacheco Street, Suite E2, Santa Fe, NM 87505, P: (505) 983 – 9555. The same address, just a new suite located behind our previous location. A digital catalogue will be available online.

Fitzgerald’s complex and time consuming painterly process captures the ephemeral history of the composition’s creation. Beginning with a collection of images or ideas that she holds in her mind, she lets the intuitive process of painting take her away from them, back to them again, and so on until the work comes to a point of (un)certainty. She works and reworks the paint on canvas—leaving notes, making marks, layering on forms and material, all the while removing bits of these layers by scraping and tooling the canvas, revealing the colors underneath. This self-reflexive painting process allows each work to create its own history. She explains, “a painting is finished when I don’t fully understand it, when it resides in between words and logic.”

About Margaret Fitzgerald:

Margaret Fitzgerald was born in London, England and grew up in both Japan and the United States. She studied fine art and art history at the School of Visual Arts and the Arts Students League in New York City, as well as studying at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She received her BFA from the University of New Mexico where she also continued her studies in Arts Education. Fitzgerald currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Fitzgerald’s extensive travels in Europe, Mexico, and South America serve as her foremost inspiration; the art, architecture, and urban fabric of these multi-cultural environments bring a richness to her artwork. She has exhibited her work extensively throughout the United States, with solo exhibitions in New York, California, and New Mexico. Her work resides in private and corporate collections across the United States, Japan, and Macao.