Humber Street Gallery is pleased to present Enjoy Civic Life, an exhibition of new work by Leo Fitzmaurice. Logos and signs are reworked and repurposed as an exploration into our relationship with branding, identity, architecture, and the history of objects.

The artist will focus on the way these image-word-symbols have lives alongside ours – altering and adapting, like us, to the changing world around us.

Through a mixture of installation, sculpture and video, Fitzmaurice has responded to a collection of mounted plaques on display in Hull’s Guildhall, which have been produced by local company GK Beaulah & Co Ltd since 1939.

Waypoint. Leo Fitzmaurice, Enjoy Civic Life. Courtesy of Humber Street Gallery and the artist, 2020. © Jules Lister

Leo Fitzmaurice also presents his sculpture, WayPoint, 2020 in the Gallery Café. Fitzmaurice has obtained the Pay Point Company’s distinctive terminals for topping up credit, which have been assembled into a freestanding sculptural work. Referencing modernist and constructivist art, the artist cuts up several of these yellow and black terminals to emphasise their shield-like qualities to create an ironic totem to the circulation of cash.

Related Events

Digital Discussion Forum: Semiotics, Signs and Language

Wednesday 23 June 2021
6-7:30pm
Online, Zoom
Free

Signs, symbols and their meaning play a key role in Leo Fitzmaurice’s artistic practice. Join artist and writer Nick Thurston for this online discussion forum surrounding Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

Nick Thurston is a writer and editor who makes artworks. He is the author of two experimental poetry books and writes regularly for the literary and arts press as well as for independent and academic publications. From 2006–18 he was a co-editor of the influential publishing collective Information As Material (York). His most recent book is the co-edited collection, Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right (Transcript, 2019). Recent exhibitions include shows at Transmediale (Berlin, 2018), Q21 (Vienna, 2018), MuHKA (Antwerp, 2018) and HMKV (Dortmund, 2019).

Artist In-Conversation: Leo Fitzmaurice with Paul Carey-Kent

Wednesday 4 August 2021
6-7pm
In-person, Humber Street Gallery
Free

Join curator and writer Paul Carey-Kent and artist Leo Fitzmaurice as they discuss the artist’s latest body of work for Humber Street Gallery, Enjoy Civic Life.

Related Activities

HSG x GK Beaulah: Design Challenge

To celebrate our new exhibition, Enjoy Civic Life by Leo Fitzmaurice, we launched a HSG x GK Beaulah: Design Challenge.

We asked children and young people (up to age 16) to design new coats of arms that represent them. From all of the designs submitted, three are being selected to be fabricated into plaques, which will be displayed in our Gallery Café.

The Artist

Leo Fitzmaurice, b.1963 Newport, Shropshire, England, now lives and works in Liverpool – based at The Bluecoat Studios. His work is described as a process of unmooring the meaning of things that are most familiar to us. To do this, he uses processes such as physically editing, repeating and mirroring, on images and objects such as packaging, brochures and signage and at a varying range of scales, from the very small and delicate through to the architectural.