21 February – 29 March 2008
For his third solo show at Sadie Coles HQ Angus Fairhurst presents a group of new sculptures and large-scale paintings. The new paintings are spatial schematics for imagined sites of desire. Occupied with the notion of terrain vague, the interstitial spaces that represent both disorder and opportunity in an urban environment that is increasingly standardized and regulated, Fairhurst imparts a belief in the potential of space while acknowledging its contested nature.
Incorporated into the paintings are advertising posters, of the type found in bus shelters and underground stations, with much of the information stripped away. Both violent and erotic, the spaces so created become gaps allowing transformation and fantasy.
The new sculptures are also concerned with the creation of and projection into space by means of gaps as material. One piece literally has the middle smashed out of it, a resin reproduction of a ‘To Let’ sign, a jagged outline framing vacant space. In contrast, made by means of building up, another work, a bronze cast of a moment of intimacy between a man and a tree, is an almost abstract composite of energetic gestures, layering and mashing: a counterpart coming into being.
As in earlier work, Fairhurst incorporates found imagery from multiple sources, distancing himself from the work's elements at the same time as he fuses them, the handmade mark as discernible as the mechanical. All of the new pieces are innately connected, idiomatic fluctuations between themes of space, desire, creativity, destruction and renewal. With material from advertising and art history, Fairhurst plays on iconographic congruities between the two, presenting a complex composition of interior and exterior worlds.
Angus Fairhurst was born in 1966 in Kent, England. He lives in London, England. His work has been exhibited widely including as part In the darkest hour there may be light: Works from Damien Hirst's Murderme Collection, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006; In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Tate Britain, London, 2004; Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London, 2001; The Anagrammatical Body, Neue Landesmuseum, Graz, Austria; Brilliant, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 1995; as well as the seminal Freeze, PLA Building, London; 1988. Solo shows include one at Spacex Gallery, Exeter, 2001; More or Less Angus Fairhurst, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2001; This Does Not Last More Than Ten Seconds, Kunsthalle St Gallen, Switzerland, 2001; and The Missing Link, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 1998. A new book on the artist’s work, with texts by Sasha Craddock and Harland Miller will be published in the late spring 2008 by Phillip Wilson Publishers.
This exhibition of works on paper by Angus Fairhurst presents a series of drawings and proposals (negations and affirmations), which together stand as a methodology for making and breaking form.
Shown in three sections within a cycle of developing ideas, the works range from written proposals, erased postcards and collages to sketches for animations. Three short text animations are also included. The whole charts a formal progression, beginning with works where the image is made by removing elements of or obliterating found imagery and ending with works built up by adding and layering repeated elements.
Angus Fairhurst's most recent animation Normal / Distorted / Superimposed was exhibited in ‘Apocalypse’ at the Royal Academy, and will also be shown in an animation exhibition at PS1 in New York in May of this year. Fairhurst has one-person exhibitions in April at the Verein Kunsthalle St. Gallen and Spacex in Exeter, in May at China Art Objects in Los Angeles, and is included in Casino at the Gemeente Museum in Gent in October.
28 October-28 November 1998: The Missing Link
With The Missing Link British artist Angus Fairhurst will exhibit together strands if his work that have, for the most part, been seen separately in London over the last few years. Sculpture, painting, animation and video are all included in this exhibition, which takes place on two sites, and is the most extensive presentation of his work to date.
Fairhurst’s work is usually time based, using a process of repetition and reduction in the open-ended pursuit of an idea. “Like seeing the back of the canvas, I think a big part of making art in the 20th century has been about showing edge, about removing artifice, removing illusion. It’s the edge of dissimulation if you like.” (Brilliant! New Art From London, Walker Art Centre, Houston)
A new series of paintings depict a primeval forest, each a hallucinogenic view of rows of tress idealised by repeated layers of colour separations. as a subject nature and landscape have a weighted history. Here they are used more as ambiguous structure than romantic metaphor with reduction and repetition acting to distill the imagery of the forest to a lean conceit. The use of random repetition in the paintings and in the animation that accompanies them introduces fallibility both in our reading and in the process of their production. The space created by something that cannot be entirely planned, the fluctuation between controlled intellect and the wilfulness of desire, allows a melancholic admittance of the possibility of failure and, conversely, regeneration.
Colour separation continues in a bank of stacked televisions that display four looped animations of a male and female figure. As in the paintings, repetition leads the viewer away from the limitations of original meaning, breaking down the hierarchy of beginning and end towards the possibility of a transformative moment.
In addition to the works at Sadie Coles HQ, a sound piece and a video projection will be installed in an empty office at 8 Heddon Street. This space will be open by appointment with kind permission of CB Hillier Parker.