Philippe Bradshaw 1965-2005

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to present an exhibition of the late Franco-British artist, Philippe Bradshaw. This show brings together Bradshaw's works from his first show at the gallery in 2000, "Sex and the British"-curated by Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram-as well as those from subsequent shows in Salzburg and Paris. This first exhibition was the beginning of an extraordinary relationship between the artist and the gallery; several solo exhibitions followed, leading to an even wider reception of his work across the European continent and abroad.

Bradshaw managed to stand out among the loudest of his YBA (Young British Artists) peers through staging provocative performance pieces in London, his rejection of the art establishment, and his overall impertinent panache. His art is at once direct and elusive, the majority of his oeuvre consisting of chain-mail pieces painstakingly created out of anodized metal links. These chains take on the resemblance of walls or curtains onto which images are often projected. Icons of the European artistic canon are projected, painted, and otherwise altered through the layering of different media. Thus, images of the Mona Lisa or of Fragonard's The Swing (as in Midlife Crisis) are given new life and changed narratives, stripped of their former context and stationary materials.

Philippe Bradshaw was born in 1965 in Lincolnshire to a British father and a French mother. After studying at Leicester Polytechnic, he moved to London to attend Goldsmiths College. Prior to the artist's untimely death, Bradshaw was witness to his work's inclusion into many important, private collections as well as to museum shows dedicated to his work, including those at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbruck, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Salamanca.