Justin Fitzpatrick: Alpha Salad
26 January – 8 May 2022
The Tetley
Justin Fitzpatrick presents Alpha Salad, his first major solo exhibition in a public gallery, exploring decadence, food and bodily consumption. Alongside new and existing works by Fitzpatrick, the exhibition includes a selection of artworks and archival material from Leeds University Library Galleries and Special Collections.
Alpha Salad presents a narrative from soil to table, that extends beyond pleasure and the aesthetic and sensory understanding of taste, to highlight the tension between the surreal theatre of germination, food preparation and service and the underlying biological necessities and risks of eating. In Alpha Salad, Fitzpatrick considers the bodies created, consumed and at work throughout the food and hospitality industry, and invites us to reconsider their complex, but often overlooked, relations and their implications in our everyday lives.
The exhibition will incorporate both Fitzpatrick’s painting and sculpture, and his curated selection of works from Leeds University Library Galleries and Special Collections, including work by Wendy Abbott, Duncan Grant and Käthe Kollwitz as well as photographs from the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture. Responding to The Tetley’s unique architectural spaces, the exhibition is imagined in a series of chapters, moving through sexual reproduction and photosynthesis to the afterlife of food presentation and consumption.
Fitzpatrick’s Alpha Salad serves up anthropomorphic plants coming of age and queer readings of hospitality workers, from existentially troubled chefs to tuxedoed flushed waiters. Against the contemporary backdrop of food poverty, the wide-reaching impacts of industrial meat farming and social media’s unhealthy obsession with ‘clean’ eating, Fitzpatrick invites us to this neurotic feast to contemplate the grotesque nature of decadence and its underlying sensitivities.
Justin Fitzpatrick: Alpha Salad is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and Fluxus Art Projects.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
Justin Fitzpatrick (b.1985 Dublin, Ireland) lives in Montargis, France. His practice explores conceptual metaphors; metaphors that structure our world view and perspective. Recent works have focused on diagrammatic hydraulic imagery, anatomical drawings, sci-fi book covers and Art Nouveau illustration. Fitzpatrick’s practice has steadily developed and increasingly gained critical attention and industry recognition. His work has been included in exhibitions in the UK and internationally.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Omega Salad, Seventeen, London (2020); A Pulsation of the Artery, Foxy Production, New York (2019), URIZEN, Sultana, Paris (2019) and Underworld, KevinSpace, Vienna (2018).
Recent group exhibitions include: Le Combat de Carnaval et Careme, Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels (2020); Mascaras (masks), Galleria Municipal do Porto, Porto, Portugal (2020); When the Sick Rule the World curated by Fanny Hauser and Viktor Neumann (2020); Salon de Peinture, MHKA- Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Antwerp (2019); Pastoral Love, Lucas Hirsch, Dusseldorf. Curated by Nils Alix-Tabeling (2019); Figure in a Landscape, Foxy Production, New York (2018); V22 Young London, V22, London (2018); Room Raiders, Mathew NYC, New York (2018); Whisky et Tabou, Musée Estrine, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (2017); Amazing girls / It’s complicated, Kevinspace, Vienna, (2017); Streams of Warm Impermanence, DRAF, London (2016); Animal Mundi – Barbican Arts Trust, London (2016); Life is On, Jakob Kroon Galerie, Stockholm (2016); Caput Medusae, Westminster Waste, London (2016); I would have done everything for you…Gimme more!, London (2016); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2015).
About The Tetley
The Tetley is a pioneering centre for contemporary art located in the stunning art deco headquarters of the former Tetley Brewery. From the heart of Leeds’ South Bank, The Tetley creates a platform for amazing emerging artists, presents breathtaking free exhibitions and helps communities and young people in Leeds find their creative voice.
The Tetley is supported by Arts Council England, Tetley’s Beers, Leeds City Council and Garfield Weston Foundation.
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About The Henry Moore Foundation
The Henry Moore Foundation was founded by the artist and his family in 1977 to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts. Today it supports innovative sculpture projects, devises an imaginative programme of exhibitions and research worldwide, and preserves the legacy of Moore himself: one of the great sculptors of the 20th century, who did so much to bring the art form to a wider audience. henry-moore.org
About Leeds University Library Galleries and Special Collections
Leeds University Library Galleries and Special Collections comprises The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, an accredited gallery with a programme of innovative art exhibitions; Treasures of the Brotherton, a museum displaying rare books and manuscripts from across the globe; and Special Collections, an outstanding research facility and home to hundreds of thousands of rare books, manuscripts, archives and art.
Leeds University Library Galleries are free and open to all. Parkinson Building, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT. Telephone 0113 343 2778 or email gallery@leeds.ac.uk.
