It is unfortunate that the British artist Angust Fairhurst died an unforeseeable death. He was an integral artist in the tumultuous wave of the YBA movement (Young British Artist), carrying the pulsating rhythm of producing work with his colleagues Sarah Lucas and the then interesting, artist Damien Hirst.
Fairhurst was born 4 October 1966 in Pembury Kent, attended The Judd school between 1978 to 1985, enrolled at Canterbury in 1985 and finally graduated in Fine Art in Goldsmiths in 1989. [1]
It is now ten years later since Angus Fairhurst had hung himself in the sparse woods of near Bridge of Orchy, Scotland, on the final day of his solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ.
And what a miserable tragedy it was. Fairhurst was the kind of artist that one could shelf with the powerhouse artists of Duchamp, Henry Moore, Nauman, Lee Lozano, Francis Alÿs. He was one of the YBA artists who had a genuine restlessness with mediums and forms, insatiable to stay consistent with one mode of art language he would always dare himself to express his re-occurring ideas and themes of thinking and feeling, in essence the duality of the human condition, and always in manifold forms. In sculpture, the black marble gorilla. In drawing, the gorilla and the fish. In animation, decapitated human forms in motion of banal absurd continuum. In painting, a violent loud Rothko-esque colour palate of infinitum landscapes. In video, himself. In print, impressionist primary colour depictions of the woods. In the most intangible material, communication – the artworld’s line of communication.
I want to recover four pieces of Fairhurst’s oeuvre that seem to have been overshadowed by Lucas’ eggs and Hirst’s shark and other things, that some still consider as art.
Fairhurst’s approach to painting was one that always had an air of dystopia, pathos and mystery. Choosing the colour palette of Rothko’s tumultuous reds, oranges and maroons, Fairhurst charges his paintings without mercy onto the surface, testing the colour digestion of the viewer. Inside the canvas he plays with geometric compositions of cuboids that rise like hard brutalist buildings, then he deploys the tromp l’oeil, and bare in mind painting with this approach during the nineties in his group was already out of fashion considering that his contemporaries were already plugging painting into a format that focused painting as something of an image, rather than something to represent space, look at Chris Offili and his Elephant shit paintings and Gary Hume with his flat minimal enamel paintings. Here was Fairhurst going against the grain in a subtle way with perspective and time, and in a way, we can take a deep sense of Fairhurst’s character as an artist who was always looking to go beyond the surface of things, which is something that could not be so easily said to the other media-crazed YBA artists.
Eenp, 2008, is a painting that asks the viewer to chase, here Fairhurst has set up a game of a path, where he hides the drama, the mystery lingers in what is around the corner of that brutalist structure that lingers in the corner of the painting unevenly. How big is the room? Why is the heavy block of just of balance? and finally, the representation of the tree, here we have to read this tree as, if not a conscious then sub-conscious meditation of Fairhurst’s childhood, his time growing up in rural Kent.
A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling, 2004, is Fairhurst’s serious approach to sculpture, taking his motif of the gorilla out of his illustrations and executing them into 3D forms, we find a greater development of Fairhurst’s need to communicate the human condition here.
The marble sculpture is a solemn gorilla in indignation of his arm dislodged from his body and on the floor. In a malicious way it is comical. The lack of sense of the situation of a gorilla loosing his arm with no conclusions or clues makes the narrative-activated sculpture funny. But once past reading the literal surface of the work, the sculpture leads to a darker understanding of the capriciousness of the Fairhurst dealing with what might seem an abstract sculptural proposition to matter and form. There is a void in this sculpture, between the indignation of the gorilla, an unfathomable baseless wail of something that is beyond words.
A Cheap and ill-fitting Gorilla Suit, 1995, Is one of the most intelligible ways an artist of the 20th century has utilized video to circuitously howl emotions, though it may not seem as so for one’s first reading, but watch again and again, watch the heavy feet stamp the floor, the slender pale Jesus-like body struggle to leap and the flimsy aluminium glide to the ground, one feels a great conflict in Fairhurst with the media, with being seen, with portraying his true-self, which again, is why the motif of the gorilla is present, it is there to hide him, is it his mask from communicating his vulnerability to the artworld.
Communication, is a prank Fairhurst played on the artworld, to its galleries and collectors, he wired the phone lines of galleries so that a galleries phone line would ring and on the recipient end would be another gallery. The piece served as a witty comment on the fast lines of communication of the gossip that occurs between art galleries. This is as experimental as Fairhurst pushes the boundaries of artistic vocabulary, utilizing the in tangible.
Angust Fairhurst had taken his life at the tender age of only 42 and it is a deep shame that we have lost one of the most artistically intelligible artist of the 21t century, one who never conformed, one who remained insatiable with forms and one who tackled the most challenging of subject matters through self-materialization, the human condition.
References:
1. . https://www.widewalls.ch/artist/angus-fairhurst/
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