Lot 18 , Steven Gregory, (b.1952), Midnight Rambler, 2008, Human skull, Russian jet, pearls and diamond

Steven Gregory
(b.1952)
Midnight Rambler, 2008
Human skull, Russian jet, pearls and diamond

£25,000-30,000
Since 2002, the central theme to Steven Gregory’s work has featured human bones and skulls as a celebration of both life and death, which caught the eye of Damien Hirst in the same year. Hirst bought seven of the skulls for his personal collection and wrote a foreword for Gregory’s exhibition, Skulduggery, in 2005 at the Cass Sculpture Foundation. “Steven Gregory… creates art that prods and pokes, ignores and strokes and slaps and stuns us into submission. My own personal favourites are the real human skull and bone pieces where just as many humans and pre-humans have done before us for tens of thousands of years, he uses decoration to try to deal with the complexity of human death, a brave attempt to celebrate the unimaginable.”

Born in South Africa, Steven Gregory studied sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art, London and went on to complete a stone mason’s apprenticeship, which led him to work on Westminster Abbey and other historic buildings. Committed to mastering traditional skills and materials, he works with a wide range of materials including precious metals, bronze, Perspex and mixed media, as well as human bones.

Gregory has responded to cultural currents with a postmodern eye and often a dashing sense of satire. Fish on a Bicycle (1998) is a witty response to the feminist dictum ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’; the sinister Bag Men (1993) animate the humble paper bag as bogey men; and his Paparazzi (1996) are subsumed by their apparatus.

Gregory has exhibited widely both in the UK and internationally, including in Germany, France, Italy, Iceland, USA and Czech Republic. His solo exhibitions include Skulduggery, at the Cass Sculpture Foundation (2005), and Bone Stone Bronze at the Nicholas Robinson Gallery in New York (2007). At the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006-7), Damien Hirst included skull works by Gregory as part of In the darkest hour there may be light, works from Hirst’s own Murderme Collection. Gregory has contributed to many other major exhibitions, including Thinking Big: Concepts for Twenty-first Century British Sculpture, at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice (2002-3), and Animal Fantastique at Les Amis du Doujon deVes, Paris (2002). Gregory is an Artist Friend of Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He now lives in Hastings.