Angus Fairhurst: Unwit

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition Unwit by Angus Fairhurst . In Unwit Angus Fairhurst presents a number of works of evisceration made beautiful and paradoxically hardened collapse. These collages and sculptures continue his engagement with the way in which spectacular images make claims on space and territory. By removing the body and text from various found sources including advertisements, fashion magazines, and exhibition invite cards, Fairhurst deflects and subverts these claims, creating new semi-abstract forms in the process. The exhibition includes a number of collages which have been made from bus stop posters layered on top of one another, their body and text removed.

Pushing his own appropriationist strategy a step further, Fairhurst has recently begun making the source material for these collages himself. For Unwit he staged his own fashion shoot which loosely replicates certain gestures found in perfume ads in two controlled interiors, one black, the other white, and an urban wasteland. All evidence of body was removed from the resulting ‘ads' which were then layered on top of each other. Fairhurst has encapsulated the resulting collages in bioresin, and they have bioresin frames modelled on those found in the London underground. As the resin “cures” it collapses slowly, although once it has set it is extremely durable—as hard as granite. The possibilities (aesthetic and otherwise) opened up by the contrast between the decaying and controlled spaces are repeated and echoed in the abstract forms created by the layering, as well as the shape of the collages themselves, which are in varying stages of collapse.

Mysterious Movement of the Wind III also addresses issues of (advertising) space: a jagged hole in a frame hung on the wall, it is based upon a smashed-up real estate sign. Freestanding sculptures include magazines with all the body and text removed and one constructed from exhibition invite cards which Fairhurst has defaced by cutting holes out of them. These gutted paper sculptures are placed on plinths cast from bioresin, which also partially sag.

Since first earning critical appraisal at the beginning of the 1990s, Fairhurst has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe and in the USA . His work was included in “Freeze” (1988); “Brilliant!”, Walker Art Center , Minneapolis (1995); “Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away”, Serpentine Gallery (1994); and “Apocalypse”, The Royal Academy, London (2000). In 2004 he participated in the three-person show, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, with his contemporaries Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst, at Tate Britain .

Pressetext

Angus Fairhurst
Unwit