Phil Ashcroft was born in Farnham, Surrey in 1970 and lives and works in south-east London. He completed a Post-Graduate Diploma in Illustration at St Martins and a BA Illustration at Harrow College of Art & Design.
Ashcroft was a Finalist in the John Moores Painting Prize 2014; the Celeste Art Prize 2007 and selected for Contemporary Art Society’s ARTfutures in 2007 and 2005. His work is held in The New Art Gallery Walsall’s permanent collection and in private collections worldwide.
His specific form of gestural, emotive abstraction combines flattened out 1980s style art deco and graffiti influences with references to American abstraction which often threaten to overwhelm the upper sections of his canvases .
Solar System Parameters was originally published by Gamma Proforma as a limited edition hardback book in late 2013. The publication included the essay below by Paul Hobson, Director, Modern Art Oxford.
‘The past is but the beginning of the beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.’ H.G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future (1901)
In his 1933 science fiction novel The Shape of Things to Come H.G. Wells wrote a future history speculating on human civilisation from 1933 to 2106. He anticipates the Second World War with frightening accuracy, which he speculates leads to the global collapse and disintegration of capitalism and the emergence of a new order under a benevolent dictator devoted to progress in science and technology, social welfare and culture. This personification of Modernism’s utopian characteristics is part of a wider manifestation of the cult of heroic social progress embodied in popular fiction and entertainment in the early decades of the twentieth century – in Hollywood movies and Marvel comics to cite just a couple of broad examples – and provides a useful introduction to the work of British painter and graphic artist, Phil Ashcroft.
Ashcroft has attracted critical interest for a diverse but coherent practice focused on contemporary issues ranging from the environment, neo-liberalism, globalisation and socio- political malaise in the early twenty-first century. His post-apocalyptic, overtly heroic landscapes reference sources as diverse as Japanese ukiyo-e art to American Pop and Abstract Expressionism, to graffiti and Marvel comics, drawing on myths and legends of failed civilisations like H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come. While there is something fantastical in tone and style in Ashcroft’s imagery, the artist draws on the immediate reality of the grand narratives of the twentieth century – a reality we all recognise – as a mirror to appraise its legacy.
Modernism’s architectural symbols and references are central in Ashcroft’s artistic vocabulary across painting, prints and lightboxes. Modernist architecture in a condition of dilapidation and decay is used as a way to critique the utopian projections of Modernism and to generate narratives about the recurring socio-economic and urban failures of the last century. Although Modernism first emerged in the early twentieth century and, by the 1920s, the prominent figures of the movement – Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – had established their reputations, it was not until after the Second World War that it gained mass popularity, after Modernist planning was implemented as a solution to the previous failure of architecture and design to meet basic social needs. During the 1930s as much as 15% of the urban populations were living in poverty, and slum clearance was one of the many social problems of this decade. Modernist planning was a popular idea, and used as a solution to these problems. But the movement could not adequately comprehend and cater for the social dynamics of family and community, and as a result many Modernist buildings were pulled down in the 1970s, the decade in which Ashcroft was born.