Angus Fairhurst

Angus Fairhurst Cover Image
Sacha Craddock
James Cahill
Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) is an artist whose wit, passion, and integrity led him to become one of the key players in the contemporary British art scene of the last three decades.
125 colour & 15 mono illustrations/ 210 x 265 mm/ 128 pages/ Hardback
ISBN 13: 
9780856676598
ISBN 10: 
978 0 85667 659 8
£29.50

He emerged as an artist of great talent in 1988 whilst still a student at Goldsmiths, when he helped organise and contributed work to the seminal exhibition Freeze. His work spans a vast range of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, performance, installation, and video, often which are used in beguiling combination; it is both provocative and versatile, having connections with the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s, as well as with the appropriative strategies of Duchamp and Dada beyond that.

From his early drawings and biomorphic animations to the bronze gorillas and magazine collages of later years, his art consistently exhibits an idiosyncratic humour and shrewd dexterity.

This monograph, the first of its kind, was planned in close collaboration with the artist. It includes a foreword by Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, and in-depth essays by Sacha Craddock and James Cahill, which begins with his final show at Sadie Coles HQ in 2008 and is thematically arranged to address the varied facets of his work: the computer-generated paintings, bronze sculptures, collages and silkscreen prints.

About the authors

Sacha Craddock is a writer, curator, teacher, and critic. She has written texts for numerous articles and monographs on an international range of contemporary artists, and appears on arts-based television programmes. She chairs New Contemporaries, an annual selection-based exhibition that gives young artists the chance to show in a major gallery space, curates the Sadler's Wells arts centre, and co-curates Bloomberg SPACE, London, which puts on a diverse programme of contemporary art.

James Cahill read Classics and English at Oxford University before studying contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute. His research has concentrated on British art from 1945 to the present.