Angus Fairhurst

The new museum M in Leuven is pleased to present two new solo exhibitions: Angus Fairhurst and Philippe Van Snick.

Angus Fairhurst

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 underscored with a particular sense of the absurd, softened by his singular brand of humour.

Angus Fairhurst is an Arnolfini exhibition curated by Tom Trevor, Director of Arnolfini, and organised in collaboration with M, The Estate of Angus Fairhurst and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Angus Fairhurst
Kurator: Tom Trevor