uggie Fields was born in 1945 and brought up in the village of Tidworth. He spent his youth in the countryside, moving to the outer suburbs of London in his adolescence. He studied architecture, briefly, at Regent Street Polytechnic before going to Chelsea School of Art graduating there in 1968. As a student, after Minimal, Conceptual and Constructivist phases he arrived at a more hard-edge post-Pop
D
Duggie Fields
Artist in Residence
figuration. By the middle of the 1970s his work included many elements that were later defined as Post-Modernism.
In 1983 in Tokyo, sponsored by the Shiseido Corporation, a gallery was created specially for his show, and the artist and his work were simultaneously featured in a television, magazine, billboard and subway advertising campaign throughout the country.
His dayglo paintings are instantly recognizable. Despite his concern with the identity-dissolving impact of mass media on the contemporary psyche, Fields manages to sustain a coherent signature style that is as flamboyantly dysfunctional as it is cool and simple. Applying overdriven colour and stripped down cartoon-ish drawing to produce mutant variations on classical poses and genres, Fields' work scrambles categories, freaked out and flatline, delirious and deadpan all at once.
Combining elements from disparate cultural and historical vocabularies, Fields' paintings now look like stained glass windows for some cathedral of modern Media. The artist's manic imagination throws up deranged icon paintings, casual violence erupting out of ritual and kitsch. In the mid-90's expanding into the digital with audio and animation, he evolved a personal form of MAXIMAlism, defining it as 'MINIMALism with a plus, plus, plus'.
MilliOnAir | ARTIST IN RESIDENCE