Nick Fudge

Nick Fudge is a conceptual artist, painter & digital artist. Fudge is a digital pioneer having worked with new media technologies since 1994. Two significant contributions of works anticipated the emergent theoretical fields of digital materialism and media archaeology.

Fudge lists his (unprinted...

Nick Fudge is a conceptual artist, painter & digital artist. Fudge is a digital pioneer having worked with new media technologies since 1994. Two significant contributions of works anticipated the emergent theoretical fields of digital materialism and media archaeology.

Fudge lists his (unprinted & unexhibited) digital works with an open ended date (1994-) marking the year he began making digital works; a completion date is only given once a work has either been printed and/or exhibited - for example, 1994-2015. Fudge's idiosyncratic indexing of his digital oeuvre is intended to mark the complete lack of visual (or even hidden) pentimenti embedded in the material of edited digital images; changes to a digital image are recorded as (hidden) file metadata.

Fudge’s approach to digital art is from the perspective of a traditional painter working closely with a number of art movements & signal works from the Western canon. He has an especial interest in the works & methods of old masters, the Modernists, & post-war artists such as Jasper Johns & Robert Ryman. For Fudge, these contrasting histories & styles function contextually, aligning this augmented studio with the broader Western canon.

Fudge’s paintings often juxtapose contrasting styles and painterly techniques in a single work of art deploying a technique of asynchronous appropriation of art historical painting styles. For example, a single painting might paraphrase the work of Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns and Robert Ryman. Fudge treats style as a preexisting cultural code, open to appropriation and recirculation in new contexts and is especially noteworthy in the artist’s reworking of ‘an array of painting ‘styles’ as style-as-simulacra in his digital ‘paintings’.