Duggie Fields

Duggie Fields grew up in the English countryside. He first came to notice in 1958, when he was 14, in the Summer Exhibition at the Bladon Gallery, Hurstbourne Tarrant, while he was attending the nearby Andover Grammar School.

Fields briefly studied architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic before studying at the Chelsea School of Art for four years starting in 1964. He left with a scholarship that took him on his first visit to the United States, in 1968. As a student, Fields' work progressed through minimal, conceptual and constructivist phases to a more hard-edged post-Pop figuration. His main influences were at that time Jackson Pollock, Mondrian and comic books, with a special regard to those worked on by Stan Lee. In 1968, after his US visit, Fields went to live in Earl's Court Square and shared a flat with Syd Barrett, who had just left Pink Floyd. Fields still lives in the same flat and he works in Barrett's former room, using it as his atelier.[2][3]

By the middle of the 1970s his work included many elements that were later defined as Post-modernist. In one painting Marilyn Monroe is shown with her head severed.[4] In 1983 Fields was invited to Tokyo by the Shiseido Corporation, where a gallery was created to show his paintings. For the occasion the artist and his work were simultaneously featured in a television, magazine, billboard and subway advertising campaign throughout Japan.[5]

In 2002, he designed posters for Transport for London.[6] In 2013 he was taken to Los Angeles by artist and benefactor Amanda Eliasch with fashion designer Pam Hogg for Opfashart, which Eliasch had put together for "Britweek".[7]

From 2013 to 2015, Fields worked for the preservation of Earls Court Exhibition Centre designed by architect Howard Crane and the surrounding area. The campaign was not successful but made people aware of the general decline of architecture in the London area.[8][9]

In 2016 Fields was celebrated by the British Film Institute FLARE with a collection of his videos.[10]

Selected solo exhibitions:

1971 Hamet Gallery, London 1972 Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford; 1975 Kinsman-Morrison Gallery, London 1979 Kyle Gallery, London; 1980 Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Midland Group, Nottingham; New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh; Roundhouse Gallery, London 1982 Spacex Gallery, Exeter; B2 Gallery London 1983 Shiseido Exhibition, Tokyo 1987 Albermarle Gallery, London 1991 Rempire Gallery, New York 2000 Random Retrospective, Virtual Gallery, DuggieFields.com

The Arts Council and University College London have examples of Fields' paintings in their collections.[11]

1976 New London in New York, Hal Bromm Gallery, New York 1979 The Figurative Show, Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London; Masks, The Ebury Gallery, London; Culture Shock, The Midland Group, Nottingham; Art and Artifice, B2 Gallery, London 1983 Taste, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1984 The Male Nude, Homeworks Gallery, London 1985 Image-Codes, Art about Fashion, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; VisualAid, Royal Academy, London l986 The Embellishment of the Statue of Liberty, Cooper Hewitt Museum/Barney's New York 1987 Twenty Artists Twenty Techniques, Albemarle Gallery, London 1989 Fashion and Surrealism, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1988 Het Mannelisknaakt, Gallery Bruns, Amsterdsm, St. Judes Gallery, London 1990 Universal Language, Rempire Gallery, New York 1993 Tranche d'Art Contemporain Anglais, Tutesaal, Luxemburg 1998 Exquisite Corpse, Jibby Beane, London 1999 Art 1999, Jibby Beane, London; Flesh, Blains Fine Art, London Nerve, I.C.A. London 2000 Art 2000, Jibby Beane, London Up &Co., New York

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