Philippe Bradshaw, 'Absolutely Mad' Artist
Bill Schenley
FROM: The Independent ~
By Adrian Dannatt
Philippe Edward Bradshaw, artist: born Stamford, Lincolnshire 26
December 1965; (one daughter with Andrea Mason); died Paris c25 August
2005.
Photo:
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/people/barone/Images/barone3-16-1s.jpg
(w/ Louise de la Tour D'Auvergne)
The life of Philippe Bradshaw, like his work, demonstrated an
eccentricity more extreme than that of the average English artist and
there was perhaps a genuinely dangerous pitch to his recklessness, his
f-you panache, which stood out even amongst the loud antics of his
peers those fabled YBAs or "Young British Artists". None of this
diminishes the genuine shock and loss of his untimely death aged 39,
nor the manner of his going, his body having been found in the Seine.
Bradshaw, whose mother was French, spoke the language like a native
and after years of somewhat sordid London living had moved to Paris
some five years ago and seemed solidly happy in that city, for both
domestically and especially in terms of his career things had rarely
seemed so promising. His dealer and patron there was the highly
successful gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac, who had persuaded him to live in
France and helped find him studio space. As Ropac regrets,
What makes this so terrible and surprising is that everything was just
starting to go so well for Philippe. It's such a waste
because it took him a long time to get this success: he always seemed
to be a bit behind the rest of his contemporaries but now it was all
happening.
Indeed Bradshaw, who was notorious in Britain for working in an
unconverted ladies' lavatory, a studio found for him by his close
friend Tracey Emin, by contrast was building a prestigious career on
the Continent.
He had recently collaborated with the choreographer Merce Cunningham,
he had commissions from major collectors, he had just been working in
Austria, had exhibitions from Saarbrücken to Salamanca and this month
was supposed to start work in Texas and San Francisco. None of this
would suggest Bradshaw took his own life, but despite the relative
stability of his Parisian existence there remained a certain
extremeness, notably glamorous at times. For, in common with a long
lineage of English artists, Bradshaw enjoyed radical social contrasts
of high and low - hanging out with his mate Malcolm McLaren at his
favourite lesbian tapas bar, mingling with the sort of dealers who
don't deal art or cavorting with European aristocrats of the more
decadent strain. Ropac admits:
Really nobody knows what happened, there was no indication, no sign,
he was always nervous about things and a bit of a wild kid who did
unusual moves. But I don't think he really planned anything, maybe it
was a certain use of substances, a certain drinking, going to the
edge. I had him on the phone the day before he went missing, he'd made
a strange phone call to his mother and she was worried and called the
gallery. But I was not so worried, he was often in these anxious
moods.
Whatever the circumstances, and there have even been rumours of foul
play within the narco demi-monde, Bradshaw went missing from his
apartment on the Friday and his body was only retrieved from the river
on the Sunday. "Nothing has been confirmed, nothing is known," as
Ropac acknowledges.
Bradshaw, whose father was English, was born in Lincolnshire and after
studying at Leicester Polytechnic moved down to London and enrolled at
Goldsmiths College. Bradshaw was there from 1985 to 1988, the period
when Goldsmiths was the veritable crucible of the "new" British art
that was soon to be so celebrated, and his fellow students included
Damien Hirst et al. In 1993 Bradshaw formed an art group, "Andrea +
Philippe", with Andrea Mason and they commenced on an ambitious
project of glazing and improving wartime bunkers around the country,
subsequently creating a fictitious estate agent to try and market
these refurbished properties. As a collaborative team they also
crashed the prestigious international exhibition "Documenta X" and
created a daughter, Fila.
From 1998 Bradshaw branched out on his own, building a distinctive
oeuvre out of such elements as amateur porn, grotesque sex toys,
throwaway debris, KY wrestling and techno music played so loud as to
become a sculptural object in itself. For a solo at the Showroom in
London Bradshaw produced a disposable lighter entitled David & Goliath
featuring the famous penis of Michelangelo's sculpture. For an
exhibition in Bethnal Green, London, Bradshaw stacked up his numerous
empty beer cans and then urinated all over them, a performance
entitled An Inventory of Everything I Drank. And on leaving London he
noted and piled up everything from his Brixton studio before setting
it all on fire, making a film of the process. As even Emin is quoted
as saying, "His art is absolutely mad."
But Bradshaw's trademark work was probably his chain-mail
installations, in which he would project pictures, whether Warhol's
Electric Chair or a Fragonard beauty, on to anodised aluminium
curtains which not only obscured the original image but lent them a
delicious glitter and glow. These aluminium chain tapestries were as
beautiful as they were sinister, their often pornographic sources
transformed into a waterfall of shimmering pixels, like a Baroque
curtain cutting off some sex-shop backroom.
And they were certainly successful, whether featuring in a group show
like "Sex & the British" curated by Norman Rosenthal of the Royal
Academy or starring solo at the highly influential gallery Deitch
Projects in New York's SoHo. As Bradshaw put it,
We enjoy the cynical, the empty when we can overcome the icon, we
enjoy being what we are: iconoclasts, breakers of images, in bondage.
He is buried in Perpignan, where his parents live.
---
His work: http://n.s.art.free.fr/image/i_bradshaw.jpg
http://www.tourismus.saarland.de/bilder/A_Fly_in_the_house_372x467.jpg
http://www.artnet.de/artwork_images/909/144715.jpg
http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/bradshaw/images/bradshaw1lg.jpg
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/FEATURES/ryan/Images/ryan8-3-2.jpg