Horses in Our Blood (GEpH018LP)

Algernon Aldridge (1961-2012)

Algernon Aldridge (20 March 1961 – 22 September 2012) was one of Northern England’s most infamous artists of modern times. Considered contemptibly irrelevant in high art circles, his work was occasionally tolerated but generally ignored by the public. Deemed ‘a ludicrous chancer’ during his lifetime, Aldridge is now considered by many to be a great visionary painter after decades of distain by the art establishment who made no secret of their antipathy towards him.

He produced as many as 42,000 works in an unfashionably figurative style and eventually inhabited a psychological fringe world, exclusively investigating hidden realities and the idiosyncratic perceptions of his own subconscious mind.

After an unremarkable period of mediocrity within the 1980s London art scene, he notoriously faked his own death in 1991, living off tinned food and bottled water within a converted attic space belonging to his agent, where he continued to paint steadily for the next two years. After being reported in the papers this apparent demise caused a renewed interest in his work, including a major 1992 retrospective held by an established dealer at The Bruford Octagon.

However this ‘posthumous’ popularity paled in comparison to the intrigue and subsequent furore caused when Aldridge was accidentally photographed mid-Whopper meal at a local Burger King in November 1993. This led to him being surgically exorcised by the art establishment of the time.

Following social banishment, he left London and spent a year living in a remote cottage near Dugdale in the Peak District, supporting himself by working at the disreputable Mermaid shipyard before being offered studio space in Clinkskell by renowned Northern artist and businessman Kynaston Mass.

The artist's studio became a magnet for aristocrats and local luminaries, who then sat for paintings. Rather than straightforward society portraits, this work often contained elongated renderings and unusual interpretations of their subjects. There was often a grisly, over-ripe and decaying listlessness on display. As if the images had arrived from a queasy, distorting mirror, reflecting a ghost world of motion-sick decomposition that glimmered with unnatural half-life.

Some were accompanied by folkloric, paganistic figures lurking at the peripheries and the majority contained perturbing representations of spectral horses gleefully contorting within the flames of an unearthly fire. Aldridge claimed these equine presences were never consciously depicted. Far from causing outrage and consternation, the local gentry actively encouraged, and were reportedly delighted by their malformed representation.

Aldridge died of spontaneous combustion in 2012. Despite his prolific output, he had only £3 cash to his name, and owed over £9 million to various creditors. Since his death however, the exponential rise in Aldridge's popularity has been amply demonstrated in the various lucrative estate auctions of his work, now exclusively owned and managed by Kynaston Mass. Examples of his best paintings have recently fetched seven figure sums in London auction rooms.