Patrick Hartigan was born in Sydney in 1977. He has been practicing and regularly exhibiting as an artist since graduating from university in 2001. His work is held in a number of public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Chartwell Collection at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T¿maki, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.He is represented by The Commercial in Sydney.Hartigan works primarily in painting but has also made moving image works and combined visual work with short fiction. In 2009 a work called My Neighbour Is a Painter (2007-08), comprising film, short prose and painting, was included in Avoiding Myth & Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World, curated by Glenn Barkley, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was later acquired by the museum.In 2009 he created a series of paintings, films and short stories, collectively titled The Village is Quiet, based on the experiences of living in the village of birth of his wife Lenka Miklos, in the Spis region of Eastern Slovakia.Since 2014 Hartigan has been the art critic for The Saturday Paper. In 2016 he was awarded a Doctor of Creative Arts by the University of Wollongong.