M Museum Leuven presents the first selected retrospective exhibition of artist Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) in Belgium. A wide range of his works will be on show which reflect his vast use of both medium and subject matter, using sculpture, drawing, video, collage, photography to represent themes of nature, sex, death, desire and consumerism. This variety portrays Fairhurst’s resistance of categorisation and leads us to look at his methods of disintegrating the process of creation, allowing his artwork to form it’s own identity, “It’s like saying a word over and over again until it loses its meaning, and then gets it back again” (Angus Fairhurst, 2004).

The Angus Fairhurst exhibition is open until 12th September 2010 at M Museum Leuven. If you can’t make it to Belgium, watch this video showing some of the exhibition artworks with commentary from Pauline Daly and Tom Trevor.

To see Fairhurst works available through Other Criteria, click here.

Angus Fairhurst
A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling II, 2003,
bronze
gorilla: 165 x 140 x 105 cm
arm: 31 x 120 x 67 cm
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Angus Fairhurst
The Problem With Banana Skins
Divided / Inverted
1998
polyurethane rubber, 36 x 36 x 7 cm
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Angus Fairhurst
Three Pages from a Magazine, Body and
Text Removed
2003
cut out magazine on paper
29.7 x 22.2 cm
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

This Does Not Last More Than Five Seconds [Yellow]
2001
watercolour on paper
68.58 x 81.28 cm
unique
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

PRESS RELEASE:

M presents the first selected retrospective exhibition of artist Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) in Belgium. One of the most influential members of the group of artists associated with London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, Fairhurst participated in the seminal exhibition, Freeze, in 1988, which introduced the world to a generation who became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), setting the tone for contemporary art in the UK over the next two decades.

This exhibition will feature examples from across his full body of work, which defied categorisation through its sheer breadth of media and invention: painting, performance, animation, photography, video, sculpture, music, print, wallpaper, drawing, collage. In contrast to the brash shock tactics of many of his contemporaries, Angus Fairhurst was an artist whose work was always a subtle combination of conceptual rigour and formal aesthetic concerns. His intriguing output cannot be placed in a single category or seen from a single perspective. Moreover, the artist often approached his work with a ready, self-parodying wit. Over twenty years, he revisited and reworked different strands of ideas, often to the extent that one set of works might appear to have little or no formal properties in common with any other. His work touches on subjects as varied as the nature of the self, desire, sex and death, the emptiness of expression, and the ubiquity and power of advertising, but always under-scored with a particular sense of the absurd, softened by his singular brand of humour. More