Nick Fudge

Last updated

Nick Fudge (aka Nicholas Fudge, born 12 August 1961) is a British painter, sculptor, and digital artist.

Contents

Fudge studied at Goldsmiths College, London, as a member of the YBA (Young British Artists) generation along with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Liam Gillick, Gary Hume, and Michael Landy. [1] At the time, his tutors Michael Craig-Martin and Jon Thompson expected Fudge to attain comparable success when, just before his graduate show, he destroyed all his artwork and disappeared from the international art world for over twenty-five years. [1] [2] In a 2016 story commemorating his return to the art world, The Times arts correspondent Jack Malvern dubbed Fudge "The Lost YBA". [3]

Education and influences

Nick Fudge attended Christ's College, Finchley from 1972 to 1977 (when it was still a grammar school) where he was in the same class group as the writer Will Self. He left early, at sixteen, to attend a graphic design course at Barnet College.

Fudge graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1988, despite destroying all his student work on the eve of his graduate show, an act inspired by a Duchampian thought-experiment which asked "what if an artist just disappeared?" [3] Shortly thereafter, Fudge "went underground"; [4] moving to the United States with his then-wife, the radical poet Tracy Angel. He received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. [2]

After graduating from Tyler, Fudge and Angel embarked upon an extended exploration of America. This road trip, with its emphasis in the American West, was formative for Fudge; "a kind of rebirth". [4] Fudge counts the Modernist painters Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Jasper Johns, [1] the poet T. S. Eliot, [5] and the writer James Joyce [4] amongst his biggest influences.

Work

For the twenty-five years that Fudge remained in self-imposed exile from the art world, he made and kept his ongoing work in secret, showing his paintings and digital works to only a few other artists and close friends. [1] [4] He began creating digital artworks in the early 1990s when he found a Macintosh Classic II in a thrift store in Montana and, sharing it with Angel who used it to write her poems, taught himself the graphics software of the day. [2] He claims that his entire digital oeuvre is still stored on outmoded macOS hard drives, almost impossible to access using modern laptops. [1] The Berlin-based art critic and curator An Paenhuysen has described these works as "post-internet in the way that [they use] the tools of the Web to create an object that in the end exists in the real world. The long incubation period of the work (1994–2015) [as an] editable digital image file... shows no trace of work over a period of time... As such, Fudge's prints are simultaneously dated and futuristic. They are modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern, all in one". [6]

Fudge's oil paintings display a deep understanding of the Modernist canon; borrowings from, and reimaginings of Cubist or Abstract Expressionist works are made to question painting itself as against digital-age hyper-imaging with its easy image editing and erasure. [1]

His sculptural works include exquisitely crafted faux luxury products and art supplies Branded "Fudge"; "Old Masters Soaps" (soap bars upon which have been painted exacting reproductions of Rembrandt sketches), and "Picasso Drive", a crushed Citroën C4 Picasso permanently installed at the Observer Building in Hastings. [7]

Exhibitions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Young British Artists</span> Loose group of visual artists

The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Landy</span> British artist

Michael Landy is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs). He is best known for the performance piece installation Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all his possessions, and for the Art Bin project (2010) at the South London Gallery. On 29 May 2008, Landy was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcus Harvey</span> English artist

Marcus Harvey is an English artist and painter, one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).

Sarah Lucas is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged in 1988. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, collage and found objects.

Joshua Richard Compston was a London curator whose company Factual Nonsense was closely associated with the emergence of the Young British Artists (YBAs).

Karsten Schubert was a German art dealer and publisher working in London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Craig-Martin</span> Irish contemporary conceptual artist and painter

Sir Michael Craig-Martin is an Irish-born contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He is known for fostering and adopting the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree. He is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths. His memoir and advice for the aspiring artist, On Being An Artist, was published by London-based publisher Art / Books in April 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman Rosenthal</span> British independent curator and art historian

Sir Norman Rosenthal is a British independent curator and art historian. From 1970 to 1974 he was Exhibitions Officer at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. In 1974 he became a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, leaving in 1976. The following year, in 1977, he joined the Royal Academy in London as Exhibitions Secretary where he remained until his resignation in 2008. Rosenthal has been a trustee of numerous different national and international cultural organisations since the 1980s; he is currently on the board of English National Ballet. In 2007, he was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. Rosenthal is well known for his support of contemporary art, and is particularly associated with the German artists Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel, the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, and the generation of British artists that came to prominence in the early 1990s known as the YBAs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">José María Cano</span> Musical artist

José Cano Andrés is a Spanish visual artist, musician, composer, and record producer. From 1982 to 1998, he was a member and principal composer of the Spanish pop-rock band Mecano. Since 1998, he works primarily in the visual arts.

Sir John Patrick Richardson, was a British art historian and biographer of Pablo Picasso. Richardson also worked as an industrial designer and as a reviewer for The New Observer.

Matthew Collings is a British art critic, writer, broadcaster, and artist. He is married to Emma Biggs, with whom he collaborates on art works.

Abigail Lane is an English artist who works in photography, wax casting, printing and sound. Lane was one of the exhibitors in the 1988 Damien Hirst-led Freeze exhibition—a mixed show of art which was significant in the development of the later-to-be YBA scene of art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Park</span> British artist and comic performer (born 1962)

Stephen Park is a British artist and comic performer. He was briefly associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and included in the seminal Freeze show.

Matthew Higgs is an English artist, curator, writer and publisher. His contribution to UK contemporary art has included the creation of Imprint 93, a series of artists’ editions featuring the work of artists such as Martin Creed and Jeremy Deller. During the 1990s he promoted artists outside the Young British Artists mainstream of the period.

Victor Arthur James Willing was a British painter, noted for his original nude studies. He was a friend and colleague of many notable artists, including Elisabeth Frink, Michael Andrews and Francis Bacon. He was married to Portuguese feminist artist Paula Rego.

Gregor Muir is Director of Collection, International Art, at Tate, having previously been the Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 2011 until 2016. He was the director of Hauser & Wirth, London, at 196a Piccadilly, from 2004 - 2011. He is also the author of a 2009 memoir in which he recounts his direct experience of the YBA art scene in 1990s London.

Simon Gales is a contemporary British artist and painter of limited output who destroys much of his work. He exhibits mainly in London and France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfe von Lenkiewicz</span> British artist

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz is a British artist known for his artistic reconfigurations of well-known imageries from art history and visual culture to create ambiguous compositions that question art historical discourses. He lives and works in London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cab Gallery</span>

Cab Gallery was an art project from 1999 to 2001 curated by London art dealer Paul Stolper of Paul Stolper Gallery and art collector and London taxi driver Jason Brown. The concept was for art to be exhibited on the outside and inside of a working London taxi rather than a traditional gallery space. As stated by Brown, "It was important to me that when working, the artwork was incidental to the journey of the passenger. I hoped they would notice but it was part of their environment and unexpected. It was also interesting to me to learn which artworks they reacted to. But it had to be a natural discovery."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susie Hamilton</span> English painter

Susie Hamilton is an English artist. She lives and works in London and is represented by Paul Stolper Gallery.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Nick Fudge exhibits his work at HSBC HQ Canary Wharf". artdaily.com.
  2. 1 2 3 Silverman, Laura (19 April 2016). "My space: Nicholas Fudge, artist" – via www.telegraph.co.uk.
  3. 1 2 Correspondent, Jack Malvern, Arts (26 April 2016). "Rebel artist who threw it all away returns after 25 years" – via www.thetimes.co.uk.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Phil King, "On Inhabiting Delay: Nicholas Fudge" (catalogue essay for "Obscured by Clouds", the Observer Building art gallery, Hastings, UK, 6 September – 11 October 2015)".
  5. ↑ "Susie Hamilton in Conversation with Nick Fudge, Turps Banana Magazine, Issue 18, July 2017".
  6. ↑ "From Berlin to Hastings: an Art Journey Through Delayed Reaction". www.sleek-mag.com.
  7. ↑ "Picasso Drive".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.