About
Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) was one of the most influential members of the group of artists associated with London's Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s. He participated in the seminal exhibition, Freeze, which introduced the world to a generation who became known as the Young British Artists, setting the tone for contemporary art in the UK over the next two decades. In contrast to the brash shock tactics of many of his contemporaries, however, he himself was an artist whose work was always a subtle combination of conceptual rigour and fine formal qualities, interrogated with an irreverent wit.
The fertile mind and anarchic spirit of Angus Fairhurst found many forms, in a body of work which defied categorisation through its sheer breadth of media and invention: painting, performance, animation, photography, video, sculpture, music, print, wallpaper, drawing, collage. Over twenty years, he re-visited and re-worked different strands of ideas, often to the extent that one set of works might appear to have little or no formal properties in common with any other. His work touches on subjects as varied as the nature of the self, desire, sex and death, the emptiness of expression, and ubiquity and power of advertising, always confronted with a particular absurdist sense of comedy.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Sadie Coles HQ.
A fully illustrated book, with texts by Sir Nicholas Serota, Sacha Craddock and James Cahill, published by Philip Wilson Publishers, will accompany the exhibition.
