Artist who turned away from YBA success about to hold his first show

Artist Nicholas Fudge who is about to hold his first art exhibition in 20 years at the Observer Bulding

The show will comprise of original editions from Fudge’s digital works series Drive, Reality Drive and Picasso. This show marks works produced for over 25 years but never seen.

A hidden figure of the YBA contemporary art milieu, for over two decades Nicholas Fudge has pushed the boundaries of traditional approaches to painting through using computing technologies to allegorize and ‘paint’ the digital.

From 1989 until the present, Fudge explored artistic practice outside art institutions, making work in solitude that evolved alongside the digital revolution - particularly the expansion of personal and Cloud computing.

Reality Drive examines representations of reality through a variety of media, including digital projection, digital printing, painting, silkscreen, and a line of artist’s materials. The selection of works in the exhibition explore the teleology of digital media - and its archaeology as a means for questioning what it means to be a user of digital image software - particularly in working with the logic of computer graphics programs to de/re/construct an ‘image.’ Moreover, Fudge allegorizes the real and the hyperreal through revealing the transparent and speculative layers of image architectures.

Nicholas Fudge studied painting at Goldsmiths’ College graduating in 1988 - one year after Liam Gillick, Fiona Rae and Sarah Lucas, in the same year as Gary Hume, Michael Landy and Angela Bulloch, and one year ahead of artists Mat Collishaw, Damien Hirst, and Abigail Lane, etc.).

At that moment, pressure was high to produce work (or make a name/brand from one’s work) for the heady 1980s art market. In a gesture of critical defiance, the artist destroyed his work two days prior to the much-hyped Goldsmith’s graduate show.

Since then (with the exception of showing in an exhibition Michael Landy curated for Karsten Schubert in 1992, which included Mat Collishaw and Sarah Lucas, etc.), Fudge has produced an extensive unseen/hidden body of work dating from 1989 to the present day.