TONY FITZPATRICK and SCOTT BRODIE
For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick will present a new selection of drawings in graphite and colored pencil on paper, as well as a suite of recent black and white etchings, in an exhibition he entitles The Ruckus.
Included are FitzpatrickÕs familiar themes: the cityÕs stockyards and Southside hangouts, past and present; its haunted alleyways and littered streets, populated by a bizarre assortment of gritty characters, real and unreal; as well as beautifully and precisely rendered portraits of birds, dogs, and people, both well-known (folkloric figures such as Holmes ÒDaddy-OÓ Daylie, the first black disk jockey to regularly host a show on one of the city's network owned-and operated stations), and not. Though FitzpatrickÕs style is boldly graphic, unvarnished, and often brutally direct (he once ran a tattoo gallery), his images still can be imbued with quiet tenderness. And while FitzpatrickÕs works are firmly rooted in Chicago, his city is all of America, both inspiring and ugly.
Also for the second time, painter Scott Brodie will be showing Street Level, a selection of new paintings of scraggly bushes, those neglected kinds that mostly go unnoticed in large cities. These humble plants, which the artist titles only by their Latin nomenclatures, like Weigela florida and Syringa vulgaris, are natives of Washington Park in Mr. BrodieÕs home town of Albany, New York. Yet he paints them with exquisite precision and restraint, as well as considerable empathy, in thickly sculpted applications of oil; their forms and ground united in a modulated, vigorous, and tautly applied, seamless surface.