Tommy Fitzpatrick
Gallery Affiliations: Inman Gallery, Charles Cowles Gallery, Schultz Contemporary, Holly Johnson Gallery
Region: West
Tommy Fitzpatrick’s Flatland is a new series of paintings
depicting artist-made geometric sculptures inspired by Edwin
Abbott Abbot’s 1884 novella Flatland. In the story, a fanciful
satire of Victorian social structure, a square that lives in twodimensional
Flatland contemplates the existence of additional
(and fewer) dimensions, following a series of dreams and an
encounter with a sphere from three-dimensional Spaceland.
Fitzpatrick’s acrylic-on-canvas paintings, each titled after a
chapter in the book, recreate the liberties and limitations in
comprehending a perspective other than one’s own, and
the interplay of dimensions in a painting. Each image is a
2D representation of a 3D object that, in turn, imperfectly
expresses fourth and fifth dimensions. As with Fitzpatrick’s
previous paintings of glass and steel architectural facades, light
plays a significant role, here casting strong shadows that create
additional 2D representations within the painting. Fitzpatrick’s
abstract, pictorially dimensional Flatland paintings also play
with Clement Greenberg’s modernist ideal of flatness as a
defining characteristic and aspiration of painting.