Angus Fairhurst

Angus Fairhurst (1966–2008) was a British artist whose practice moved across painting, sculpture, video, performance and printed matter. A central figure in the generation of artists who emerged from Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, Fairhurst was closely associated with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and the broader YBA milieu, though his work maintained a consistently oblique relationship to the spectacle that surrounded it.

Fairhurst’s output was marked by a particular kind of deadpan wit — an interest in failure, repetition and the gap between intention and result. His gorilla sculptures, his gallery-to-gallery telephone pieces, and his paintings of figures dissolving into abstraction all share a quality of deflation: the work arrives at its subject by a route that refuses the direct approach.

Publications connected to Fairhurst’s exhibitions are rare and correspondingly significant: small-edition catalogues and printed matter that document a practice cut short by his death in 2008, and that preserve the particular register of his intelligence in the format of the page.

  • Package Holiday: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection, The Hydra Workshop, Hydra, 1997. Front cover: solid bright blue card with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" in large black bold type lower left; 15 artist names in three rows of small white text below — Don Brown, Peter Doig, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson, Georgina Starr, Sam Taylor-Wood, Nicola Tyson, Gillian Wearing. Landscape format, 21 × 15 cm. Light handling cr Package Holiday, Hydra Workshop, 1997. Interior spread: left, full-bleed colour photograph of Hydra harbour and hillside town — whitewashed cubic buildings descending to the water, blue sky and sea; right, white page with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" heading in bold blue type, two paragraphs of exhibition text, and black silhouette of three stacked suitcases lower centre.

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997