Angus Fairhurst

Sadie Coles HQ’s new exhibition of drawings and sculptures by Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) draws together key works from throughout his career. The pieces have been selected and arranged by artists Urs Fischer and Rebecca Warren, friends and contemporaries of Fairhurst with whom he maintained long-term creative dialogues. Various friends of the artist have also built plinths for the different sculptures that serve as individual tributes to Fairhurst’s life and work. 

By turns cartoonish and diagrammatic, Fairhurst’s drawings epitomise his offbeat and melancholy-tinged humour, as well as his fascination with gorillas as figures of pathetic buffoonery and otherworldliness. In one work, a gorilla bears the slumped body of a dead man in a surreal quotation of the the Pieta (a pose that Fairhurst adoped himself in a photograph of 1996). In a companion piece, the body has toppled onto the floor. Elsewhere we encounter two gorillas hoisting enormous fish under their arms in front of an amber-hued sunset. [This incongruous and oddly poignant coupling of ape, man’s nearest animal relative, and fish, his primordial ancestor, expresses both opposition and symbiosis, and both a beginning and an end. Here and throughout Fairhurst’s art, origin and outcome sit side-by-side.]

The drawings range from small-scale vignettes (such as a graphite study of a banana springing out of its skin) to expansive sequences of disembodied, gyrating pairs of limbs. Collectively they form an anthology of Fairhurst’s enduring interests, whether in nature, the romantic pastoral, or cycles of regeneration and decay. 

[From around the turn of the millennium, Fairhurst began making sombre bronze successors to his anthropomorphic drawings, their pitted and textured surfaces bearing witness to his process of clay modelling.] The bronzes in the show include a series of maquettes of gorillas in absurdist guises (several of which have large-scale counterparts) - flattened into a rug in A Couple of Differences between Thinking and Feeling (Flattened) (2001), or gazing into a mirror in The Birth of Consistency (2004). Like Narcissus, The gorilla is incapabable of understanding its own reflection and surreally wrenches the glass pool up towards it. The motif of the pond also appears in two larger sculptures, where mottled bronze banks enclose sections of mirror.

Untitled (With Bird) (2007) surreally transposes a donkey’s head onto the body of a gorilla, producing a characteristically tragicomic spectre. The piece revisits an early drawing of a gorilla with an ass’s head, alluding perhaps to the buffoonish figure of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lessons in Darkness (2008) depicts a tree and man melding copulatively into the same matter, expressing notions of cyclical regeneration and an entropic return to origins. [These concepts are aptly summed up in Fairhurst’s musing in the catalogue for In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (2004): “All matter conspiring: under the pavement the mud. Where are the arms of the Venus de Milo? Ground by a million footsteps back into the earth, clay from which vessels are made.” ]

The show will also feature a selection of the postcards that Fairhurst studded with holes and scratched out. Tango (Gridded and Drilled) (1996) shows his early techynique of puncturing grids of holes into found images, so as virtually to occlude the original picture from view. The series All Evidence of Man Removed involved scratching away any human figures from postcards, to leave abstract  ‘blank’ in the middle of picturesque scenes.

From 2009-10, Angus Fairhurst’s work has been exhibited in a touring retrospective at Arnolfini, Bristol, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, and M Museum, Leuven, Belgium. Angus Fairhurst graduated from Goldsmiths College in London in 1989. Following Freeze (1988),he exhibited in most of the landmark group exhibitions of his generation, including Gambler (1991) at Building One, London, Brilliant at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis (1995), Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away at the Serpentine (1994), Apocalypse at the Royal Academy (2000), and In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, with Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst, at Tate Britain (2004). He also had a number of significant one-person exhibitions, notably This Does Not Last More Than One Second at Spacex Gallery, Exeter (2001), at Sadie Coles HQ, in London, and at galleries in New York, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Vienna and Amsterdam. Music performances by Fairhurst’s band, originally called Low Expectations, took place at an international range of venues from 1995-2001. In Belgium his work was shown at S.M.A.K. during the Casino 2001 exhibition in 2001.