Matthew Higgs (born 1964) is an English artist, curator, writer and publisher. His contribution to UK contemporary art has included the creation of ''Imprint 93'', a series of artists’ editions featuring the work of artists such as

Martin Creed Martin Creed (born 21 October 1968) is a British artist, composer and performer. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for exhibitions during the preceding year, with the jury praising his audacity for exhibiting a single installation, ''Work No. 22 ...

and

Jeremy Deller Jeremy Deller (born 30 March 1966) is an English conceptual, video and installation artist. Much of Deller's work is collaborative; it has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through th ...

. During the 1990s he promoted artists outside the

Young British Artists The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsm ...

mainstream of the period.

Early life and ''Imprint 93''

Higgs was born in

West Yorkshire West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into exi ...

. He studied Fine Art at

Newcastle Polytechnic , mottoeng = A lifetime of learning , established = 1877 - Rutherford College of Technology1969 - Newcastle Polytechnic1992 - gained university status , type = Public , budget = ...

.(since renamed the University of Northumbria) In 1988, he moved to

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

and worked for the Grey advertising agency in the media department.David Barrett, ''Art Monthly'', September, 1995. In 1993, he founded his own press, ''Imprint 93'', publishing a series of artist’s editions and multiples. Participating artists included:

Billy Childish Billy Childish (born Steven John Hamper, 1 December 1959) is an English painter, author, poet, photographer, film maker, singer and guitarist. Since the late 1970s, Childish has been prolific in creating music, writing and visual art. He has le ...

Chris Ofili Christopher Ofili, (born 10 October 1968) is a British Turner Prize-winning painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in T ...

, Elizabeth Peyton,

Peter Doig Peter Doig ( ; born 17 April 1959) is a Scottish painter. One of the most renowned living figurative painters, he has settled in Trinidad since 2002. In 2007, his painting ''White Canoe'' sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction r ...

and

. In 1994, Higgs exhibited at

EASTinternational EAST''international'' is an open submission exhibition that was launched in 1991 and curated by Lynda Morris at Norwich Gallery at Norwich University of the Arts. Applications from over 1,000 contemporary artists are received each year with appro ...

which was selected by

Jan Dibbets Jan Dibbets (born 9 May 1941, in Weert) is an Amsterdam-based Dutch conceptual artist. His work is influenced by mathematics and works mainly with photography. Life and career In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he started as an art teacher at th ...

and Rudi Fuchs. The exhibition "Imprint 93/Cabinet Gallery", featuring the work of Martin Creed, was held at Cabinet Gallery in 1994. "Imprint 93/City Racing" was held at

City Racing City Racing was a squatted artist-run space in Oval Mansions, Kennington, South London which was active between 1988 and 1998. It was a cooperative by five artists Matt Hale, Paul Noble, John Burgess, Keith Coventry and Peter Owen. They set ...

in 1995.

"British Art Show 5" and "Protest and Survive"

In 2000, he curated the " British Art Show 5". This major touring exhibition sought to show that British art embraced a wider range of practices than was indicated by the label "Young British Artists" His exhibition "Protest and Survive" (curated with

Paul Noble Paul Noble (born 1963) is a British visual artist. Life and career Noble studied at Humberside College of Higher Education (1983–1986) and Sunderland Polytechnic (1982–1983), before moving to London in 1987. He was one of the five fou ...

) at the

Whitechapel Art Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the ...

in 2000 reflected a renewed interest in the art of the 1970s. In 2001, he described a new aesthetics emerging in British art, pointing to the work of

Turner Prize The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible (this restriction was removed for the 2017 award). ...

nominees Mike Nelson and Martin Creed. He described these artists as part of a "parallel generation to the YBAs", and bemoaned that younger artists were "still adhering to the YBA orthodoxy promoted by

Charles Saatchi Charles Saatchi (; ar, تشارلز ساعتجي; born 9 June 1943) is an Iraqi-British businessman and the co-founder, with his brother Maurice, of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The brothers led the business – the world's largest ...

Career after 2000

Between 2001 and 2004, he was appointed as a curator at the

Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts Established in 1998, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a contemporary art center in San Francisco, California, US, and part of the California College of the Arts. It holds exhibitions, lectures, and symposia, releases publications, an ...

at the

California College of Arts and Crafts California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

in San

Francisco Francisco is the Spanish and Portuguese form of the masculine given name '' Franciscus''. Nicknames In Spanish, people with the name Francisco are sometimes nicknamed " Paco". San Francisco de Asís was known as ''Pater Comunitatis'' (father o ...

. In 2009 Higgs curated an exhibition of

Lucas Samaras Lucas Samaras (born 1936) is a Greek-American artist. Early life and education Samaras was born in Kastoria, Greece. He studied at Rutgers University on a scholarship, where he met Allan Kaprow and George Segal. Career Samaras participated in ...

' work for

Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders wi ...

's national pavillion at the

53rd Venice Biennale The 53rd Venice Biennale was an international contemporary art exhibition held in 2009. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Daniel Birnbaum curated its central exhibition, "Making Worlds". Awards ...

. As of 2004, Higgs is currently director of

White Columns White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit art space. White Columns is known as a showcase for up-and-coming artists, and is primarily devoted to emerging artists who are not affiliated with galleries. All work submitted i ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. In 2006, he was one of the Turner Prize judges, and was interviewed about the judging process by

Sarah Thornton Sarah L. Thornton (born 1965) is a writer, ethnographer and sociologist of culture. Thornton has authored three books and many articles about artists, the art market, technology and design, the history of music technology, dance clubs, raves ...

in Seven Days in the Art World. In 2007 he selected

with Marc Camille Chaimowicz. Higgs is also a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance. As an artist Higgs had a one-person exhibition, ''Not Worth Reading'', in 2003 at the Wilkinson Gallery in London. It comprised a wide variety of works, from framed book pages to a wall painted in green emulsion. ''

Frieze In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...

'' concluded that the work "ultimately relies on his other practices and interests" and "more often than not reveal unexpected nuances that speak as much of the participatory nature of art as of the impossibility of information and interpretation." His work is held in the collection of the

Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

The Matthew Higgs Society

From 2006 to 2010

Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and Central Park North on the south. The greater Ha ...

art gallery Triple Candie (a duo of art historians, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett) created a "non-membership-based honor society" focused on the life and work of Higgs.''Matthew Higgs Society''
/ref> This society claimed to be a "living archive" on his life and art career. The Higgs archive includes writings by and about Higgs, press clippings, reproductions of Higgs' artwork, documentation and ephemera related to exhibitions he has curated, zines, photographs, and other materials.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Higgs, Matthew English contemporary artists English curators British conceptual artists Living people 1964 births People from West Yorkshire