| Dates: | born --1966
| | Biography: | Angus Fairhurst was born in Kent in
1966 and studied at Canterbury Art
College and Goldsmiths College,
London. In 1988 he participated in the
ground-breaking group exhibition
Freeze along with contemporaries
including Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and
Sarah Lucas.
Fairhurst's work is often structured
like an open-ended riddle, in
which clues in the form of wordplay or
visual puns are left unresolved. He is
best known for his bronze gorilla
sculptures and his collages of
billboard advertisements and fashion
magazines with the body and text
removed, but he works across a range of
media, from photography and painting to
performance, video and animation.
Appropriation is at the core of much of
his practice. As well as
constructing anthropomorphic or
stylised versions of nature, he also
borrows material and images, subverting
their original appearance
and value, to create new forms which
are at times humorous, or elegant, but
always ambivalent.
His work was included in Some Went
Mad,
Some Ran Away, Serpentine
Gallery (1994); Brilliant! New Art from
Britain, Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis (1995); Apocalypse,
Royal Academy (2000);
Century City: Art and Culture in the
Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern
(2001); Casino 2001, Smak, Gent
(2001);
and Man in the Middle,
Sammlung Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt am
Main (2002). In 2004 Fairhurst
participated in the exhibition In-A-
Gadda-Da-Vida with Damien Hirst
and Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain. In
2004 two museums also held one-
person shows of his work: Unwork,
Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin,
and Dysuniversal, Georg Kargl, Vienna.
Bronze sculptures are currently (or
about to be) on display in the
collections of Damien Hirst, Lord
Rothschild, Boymans-Van Beunigen
Museum Rotterdam, Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, Mario Testino,
Contemporary Art Society, and Celebrity
Cruise Lines. Fairhurst's
work has also been included in this
year's summer exhibition at the Royal
Academy.
| | | Source: | New Contemporaries website - | | | Date of source: | Accessed 2006 |
|
| | Gender: | Male | | Type: | person |
| |
