Profile - Phil Ashcroft

Photo: Meg Shirayama, 2023

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.

Paul Hobson, Director, Modern Art Oxford

Cynical, dissatisfied, border-line disruptive, the work broods with a simmering revolutionary disquiet.

Simon Hollington, Writer & Artist

A 21st century John Martin if John Martin was painting Mega-City One after the neutron bomb had been dropped.

Selected solo exhibitions include Moonbeams, Bearspace, London (2020); Fallout, Canal Projects, London (2016); Cave Paintings, Lewisham Arthouse, London (2015); Galácticos, Gamma Transport Division, Edinburgh (2013); Toxicity, Margaret Harvey Gallery, University of Hertfordshire, St Albans (2006); Yeti In Hong Kong, EXIT, Hong Kong (2005) and Nitro Deluxe, Deptford X, London (2001).

Recent group exhibitions include Incomers: North Devon Artist Residency, BBNR gallery, London (2021); In Between Space, Time and a Pattern of Chaos, Fousion Gallery, Barcelona (2020); Six Days in December, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London (2019); London Graphics (curator), Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London (2018); Live Painting in Taikoo Park, part of Hong Kong Arts Month, Art Basel Hong Kong (2018); Painter Maker (with Sibley Sparling), Henry Saywell, London (2017).

Phil Ashcroft, Aedas London, Timelapse Painting, 2014 from Phil Ashcroft on Vimeo.

Ashcroft also exhibits as ‘PhlAsh’ collaborating on live-painting projects in galleries and alternative spaces from street locations to shops. These have included No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern, London (2010); Cans 2 Festival, London (2008); Special Relationship, Scion Space, Los Angeles (2008), Elephant Technique, Village Underground (2006), All The People We Like Are Dead, London (2004), and Graffiti Meets Windows 1, Hank-Yu Department Store, Osaka (2002).

Commissions include work for Aedas Architects, Amnesty International (UK), British Film Institute, The Royal Mail and Sony PSP. Solar System Parameters, an overview of works from 2005-13 with text by Paul Hobson, Director, Modern Art Oxford, was published by Gamma Proforma (2000-2018) in 2013.

Download CV (1-page pdf) here

To arrange a studio visit or to request a pdf of available original works email info@philashcroft.com

John Moores Painting Prize 2014, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Live Painting with The Scrawl Collective in No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern, London, 2010, photo Matthew Blaney and Joe Plommer

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