Exhibitions
Michael Patrick Harrigan
Echo Logic or Sound Device with
Moveable Balls, 1982,
Metal, painted wood, Masonite and magnets
MICHAEL PATRICK HARRIGAN: BALANCING DRAWINGS AND SCULPTURE
Continues through November 6, 2010
Michael Patrick Harrigan was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1954. After receiving a BFA from Alma College, in Michigan he attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he earned an MFA in 1980. Following his formal education, Harrigan has enjoyed significant experience in the field of contemporary art. In 1980, while at Cranbrook, Harrigan worked with the architect Daniel Libeskind to print a suite of ten collotype prints. Following that he held professional positions at the Midland Center for the Arts, in Michigan; Gemini G.E.L, Los Angeles; the Downey Museum of Art, Downey, California; and the Tamarind Institute, University of New Mexico. From 1985-90, Harrigan was the curator for Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida. Currently, Harrigan is the curator for James Rosenquist Inc. in Aripeka, Florida. However, Harrigan resides in Trappe, Maryland, with his family. Throughout his career, Harrigan has worked extensively with some of the best known American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, and many others.
While many of the aforementioned artists might be strongly associated with the figure or realism, Harrigan might be labeled a post-minimalist. As such, his work is characterized by simplicity of form and subtly expressed content. In his drawings, we see an underlying grid structure and harmony with the blank space of the paper. In Harrigan’s three-dimensional work, there is a search for refinement in the geometric forms.