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

digital artist Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various names ...

. Fudge studied at

Goldsmiths College Goldsmiths, University of London, officially the Goldsmiths' College, is a constituent research university of the University of London in England. It was originally founded in 1891 as The Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute by the Wor ...

, London, as a member of the YBA (

Young British 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 Goldsm ...

) generation along with

Damien Hirst Damien Steven Hirst (; né Brennan; born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingd ...

Sarah Lucas Sarah Lucas (born 1962) is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, collage and found objects. ...

Liam Gillick Liam Gillick (born 1964, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire) is a British artist who lives and works in New York City.

Gary Hume Gary Stewart Hume (born 9 May 1962) is an English artist. Hume's work is strongly identified with the YBA who came to prominence in the early 1990s. Hume lives and works in London and Accord, New York.

, and

Michael Landy Michael Landy (born 1963) 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 ...

. At the time, his tutors

Michael Craig-Martin Sir Michael Craig-Martin (born 28 August 1941) is an Irish-born contemporary art, 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 artw ...

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. In a 2016 story commemorating his return to the art world,

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

arts correspondent Jack Malvern dubbed Fudge "The Lost YBA".

Education and influences

Nick Fudge attended

Christ's College, Finchley Christ's College is a secondary school with academy status in East Finchley, London, United Kingdom. It falls under the London Borough of Barnet Local Education Authority for admissions. Since September 2018, Christ’s College Finchley has off ...

from 1972 to 1977 (when it was still a

grammar school A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching Latin, but more recently an academically oriented secondary school ...

) where he was in the same class group as the writer

Will Self William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English author, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Sel ...

. He left early, at sixteen, to attend a

graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...

course at

Barnet College Barnet and Southgate College is a further education college in North London, England. The current college was established in 2011. It has three main campuses and two other learning centres in the London Borough of Barnet and the London Borough o ...

. Fudge graduated from

, 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?" Shortly thereafter, Fudge "went underground"; moving to the United States with his then-wife, the radical poet Tracy Angel. He received his MFA from

Tyler School of Art The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Tyler, Fudge and Angel embarked upon an extended exploration of America. This road trip, with its emphasis in the

American West The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the Wes ...

, was formative for Fudge; "a kind of rebirth". Fudge counts the Modernist painters

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...

Pablo Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

Francis Picabia Francis Picabia (: born Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia; 22January 1879 – 30November 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism ...

, and Jasper Johns, the poet

T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biogr ...

, and the writer

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

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. He began creating digital artworks in the early 1990s when he found a Macintosh Classic II in a thrift store in

Montana Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbi ...

and, sharing it with Angel who used it to write her poems, taught himself the graphics software of the day. He claims that his entire digital oeuvre is still stored on outmoded

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

hard drives A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magneti ...

, almost impossible to access using modern laptops. The

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

-based art critic and curator An Paenhuysen has described these works as "post-internet in the way that hey usethe 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)

s an S, or s, is the nineteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ess'' (pronounced ), plural ''esses''. History ...

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 Modern may refer to: History * Modern history ** Early Modern period ** Late Modern period *** 18th century *** 19th century *** 20th century ** Contemporary history * Moderns, a faction of Freemasonry that existed in the 18th century Phil ...

postmodern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...

, and post-postmodern, all in one". Fudge's

oil paintings Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...

display a deep understanding of the Modernist canon; borrowings from, and reimaginings of Cubist or

Abstract Expressionist Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

works are made to question painting itself as against digital-age hyper-imaging with its easy image editing and erasure. 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 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally consid ...

sketches), and "Picasso Drive", a crushed

Citroën C4 Picasso The Citroën C4 SpaceTourer (formerly the Citroën C4 Picasso) is a five-seater car produced by French manufacturer Citroën with a seven-seater version called the Grand C4 SpaceTourer (formerly the Grand C4 Picasso) also available. It has a five ...

permanently installed at the Observer Building in

Hastings Hastings () is a large seaside town and borough in East Sussex on the south coast of England, east to the county town of Lewes and south east of London. The town gives its name to the Battle of Hastings, which took place to the north-west ...

Exhibitions

*1992,

Karsten Schubert Karsten Schubert (12 August 1961 – 30 July 2019) was a German art dealer and publisher working in London. Career Before opening his own gallery, Schubert worked at the Lisson Gallery. Karsten Schubert London Schubert ran Karsten Schubert Lon ...

, London, "Fifth Anniversary Exhibition", curated by

. Group show featuring Mat Collishaw,

Keith Coventry Keith Coventry is a British artist and curator.Burgess, John, Coventry, Keith, Hale, Matt, Noble, Paul, Owen, Peter. "City Racing: The Life and Times of an Artist-Run Gallery ardcover. Black Dog Publishing Ltd; illustrated edition (11 November ...

, Tobias Eyferth, Nick Fudge, and

*1994, Temple Art Gallery, Philadelphia, "Materials for Nothing", MFA thesis exhibition *2014, 王欣 The Gallery, Shanghai, "Westbund Art & Design Fair", curated by Wan Xin *2015, Observer Arts, Hastings, "Obscured by Clouds", a two-person exhibition (with Phil King) *2015, Zwitscher Maschine, Berlin, "Die Lichtenberg Norm", curated by Spunk Seipel *2015–16, Albus 3 Arts, Northampton, "Borderlands", group exhibition *2016, Observer Arts, Hastings, "Reality Drive", solo exhibition *2016, Fitzrovia Gallery, London, "Reality Drive:Escape Velocity", solo exhibition *2018, HSBC HQ Canada Square, London, "Undo Redo Return", solo exhibition and artist's talk *2019
Kunstverein Speyer
Berlin, "Digital Divide", group exhibition with artists Römer + Römer and Andreas Lau *2021
Hilbert Raum
Berlin, "Digital Divide II", group exhibition with artists Römer + Römer, Andreas Lau
Enda O'Donoghue
an
Sandra Schlipkoeter

References

External links

*
PDF of "Susie Hamilton in Conversation with Nick Fudge", Turps Banana Magazine, Issue 18, July 2017
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fudge, Nick 1961 births 20th-century English painters Alumni of Goldsmiths, University of London British digital artists English contemporary artists Living people Young British Artists