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Ali Fitzgerald’s Five Seasons of Magritte

by , May 2018

On the occasion of René Magritte: The Fifth Season, Berlin-based comic artist Ali Fitzgerald has created a series of graphic responses to works in the exhibition. Fitzgerald’s comic arrangements imagine backstories for Magritte’s most iconic characters, depicting a bowler-hatted man’s dysfunctional relations with a lion, a scissor-wielding rose, and a romantic pair of inverted mermaids. Each scenario revisits existing tensions or moments of tenderness in Magritte’s compositions and then stages the figures to interact in new, dynamic narratives. Through her illustrations, Fitzgerald creates an additional lens through which to examine and better understand the humor, surrealism, and dreamy love stories at work within René Magritte’s late painting.

Treacherous Cuts

Make-out Point for Fish People

Full Heart, Clear Ideas

The Fight

Weathermen

Referenced Works

Le Stropiat (The Cripple), 1948

Le Coup au Coeur (The Blow to the Heart), 1952

Les merveilles de la nature (The Wonders of Nature), 1953

Les idées claires (Clear Ideas), 1955/ca. 1958

Le mal du pays (Homesickness), ca. 1948

Le fils de l’homme (Son of Man), 1964

L’heureux donateur (The Happy Donor), 1966

Ali Fitzgerald

© Ali Fitzgerald

Ali Fitzgerald

Ali Fitzgerald is a comic artist and writer living in Berlin. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and recently began a monthly satirical comic there about America. She has also contributed comics to New York Magazine’s The Cut, Modern Painters, the New York Times, Art-Das Kunst Magazin and Greenpeace Magazine. She wrote and drew the popular webcomic "Hungover Bear and Friends" for McSweeney’s from 2013 to 2016. Her comics have also appeared in the Huffington Post, Gastronomica, Berlin Quarterly, Bitch, and Varoom Magazine and her artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Europe as well as featured in the New York Times, Juxtapoz, Artlies! and Art in America. She has been a regular contributor to the arts e-magazine Art21 since 2010, where she started the column Queer Berlin which explored the queer cultural zeitgeist in Berlin. Her first book titled, Drawn to Berlin, about teaching comics in refugee shelters and Berlin’s evolving relationship to Bohemia and immigration will be published in October 2018 by Fantagraphics.