Justin Fitzpatrick
Underworld
Jan 13?March 4, 2018
Opening: Jan 12, 7pm
In the modern image of the individual body, sexual life, eating, drinking, and defecation have radically changed their meaning: they have been transferred to the private and psychological level where their connotation becomes narrow and specific, torn away from the direct relation to the life of society and to the cosmic whole. In this new connotation they can no longer carry on their former philosophical functions.
(Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world, p.321)
Kevin Space is happy to announce Justin Fitzpatrick?s solo exhibition Underworld.
In the above text Bakhtin discusses the psychological shifts from a pre-privatised medieval world, where food was farmed and consumed collectively to the abstraction of labor. The body itself was no longer of the public domain, including group feasting, open defecation, urination and sexual life but subscribed into the logic of productivity. A sort of theater of the Grotesque and Excessive, Underworld uses Michael Bakthin?s notion of the Grotesque as a starting point of the exhibition, summed up in the image of a gaping open mouth, the idea of consuming the world through absorption into the body.
Justin Fitzpatrick, born in 1985 in Dublin, lives and works in London and Brussels. Recent solo exhibitions include F-R-O-N-T-I-S-P-I-E-C-E (Seventeen, London) and Uranus (Sultana). His works have been shown in the following group exhibitions: Whisky et Tabou, Musée Estrine, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (2017); Amazing girls / It?s complicated, Kevin Space, 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).