Matthew Darbyshire (born 1977, Cambridge, UK) is a British artist who lives and works in London.

Background

Darbyshire was born in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

, UK, in 1977. He completed his BA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, before going on to complete his Post-Graduate Diploma at Royal Academy Schools, graduating in 2005. Darbyshire has held teaching positions at the

Slade School of Fine Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

, London, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, Open School East, London/Margate, Goldsmiths,

Royal Academy Schools The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpo ...

, London and Dirty Art Dept, Amsterdam.

Exhibitions

Darbyshire's work has been exhibited at the

Hayward Gallery The Hayward Gallery is an art gallery within the Southbank Centre in central London, England and part of an area of major arts venues on the South Bank of the River Thames. It is sited adjacent to the other Southbank Centre buildings (the Roy ...

Manchester Art Gallery Manchester Art Gallery, formerly Manchester City Art Gallery, is a publicly owned art museum on Mosley Street in Manchester city centre. The main gallery premises were built for a learned society in 1823 and today its collection occupies three c ...

, Krolikarnia National Museum, Warsaw,

The Hepworth The Hepworth Wakefield is an art museum in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England, which opened on 21 May 2011. The gallery is situated on the south side of the River Calder and takes its name from artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth who was born an ...

, Wakefield, Tramway, Glasgow,

Whitechapel Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the fir ...

, the

Royal Academy of Arts The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpo ...

. His work is in the public collections of Arts Council Collection, UK Government Art Collection, UK,

Artist Pension Trust The Artist Pension Trust (APT), which merged into the MutualArt Group in 2016, is an investment vehicle specializing in contemporary art, which aims to provide financial security and international exposure to selected artists chosen by its intern ...

, New York, US,

Deutsche Bank Deutsche Bank AG (), sometimes referred to simply as Deutsche, is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Sto ...

, Frankfurt, DE,

Centre National des arts Plastiques The Centre national des arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts, Cnap) is a French institution established in 1982 under the Ministry of Culture and Communication that promotes creation of visual arts. It provides assistance to artists and ...

, Paris, FR,

, Wakefield, UK. Public commissions are on display at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, Olympic Stadionplein, Amsterdam, NL and Sculpture Garden, Battersea in London.

Works

In 2014 Darbyshire created the polystyrene sculpture ''Hercules'', which is an imitation of the ''

Farnese Hercules The ''Farnese Hercules'' ( it, Ercole Farnese) is an ancient statue of Hercules, probably an enlarged copy made in the early third century AD and signed by Glykon, who is otherwise unknown; the name is Greek but he may have worked in Rome. Like ...

.'' The deliberate choice of a white material has been interpreted as a perpetuation of colourism in how we view and understand classical sculpture.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Darbyshire, Matthew 1977 births Living people 21st-century British artists Artists from Cambridge Artists from London Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art Alumni of the Royal Academy Schools