Obituary - The Guardian

Philippe Bradshaw, who has died unexpectedly, aged 39, had an energetic perversity that both fuelled and stymied his art. Although at the centre of the Goldsmiths College generation that included Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas (during and after college he shared a house with Michael Landy and Ian Davenport, and a studio with Fiona Rae), he did not share their early market success.
Bradshaw's output was erratic, idiosyncratic and unpredictable. He loved to create (and sometimes wreak havoc in) environments, often living in his exhibition spaces and filling them with high-decibel techno music and the detritus of his daily life, as well as disquieting combinations of objects and images. His 1999 exhibition-cum-residency at the Showroom Gallery, London, resulted in a dark, threatening environment that included a rock garden made from rubble, a chaise longue planted with pink fir apple potatoes and a pornographic film projected on to a shimmering screen of multicoloured metal chains.

Bradshaw was born in Uppingham. When the family moved to Stamford, he attended the boy's school in the Lincolnshire town as had his father - an agricultural merchant - and his grandfather before him. But his mother was French and Philippe always felt more empathy with his Gallic lineage.

While at Goldsmiths in 1986, Bradshaw met Andrea Mason, who was studying languages at King's College. They lived and worked together for 13 years, and had two sons, Fila and Pépé. Between 1993 and 1998 they collaborated under the name Andrea + Philippe on a series of ambitious projects. For Landfill they toured the country researching wartime pillboxes and set up a faux estate agents at the IAS gallery in Chelsea, complete with property details, offering to glaze the lookout apertures to order. In 1997 they took Landfill on the road in a caravan, but the next year it was burnt to the ground by arsonists outside Norwich Gallery, where it had formed part of a show of artist's multiples (signed editions for sale).

Bradshaw's 1998 exhibition, The Waiting Room, in Wolverhampton (during which he lived on site in a greenhouse) launched his solo career and introduced the curtains of multicoloured anodised aluminium chain that were to play a prominent part in his subsequent work, both incorporating images and acting as a fluid screen for films and projections that ranged from the art historical to the pornographic. With glimpses of Fragonard's Swing, Mondrian's grids or the pole dancers of Kingsland Road in Hackney, these veils of linked metal were both decorative and hardcore, emitting a sinister glamour and a strong erotic charge.

Although Bradshaw largely eschewed the art establishment, it began to recognise him. In 2000 he received a Hamlyn Award and showed alongside Gilbert & George, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Sarah Lucas in Sex and the British, curated by the Royal Academy's Norman Rosenthal in Paris and Salzburg. He began to make forays into the art market, in 2001 showing at Jeffrey Deitch Projects, New York and, his first solo show, at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris. In 2004 he was given his first museum show, at Museum Der Moderne Salzburg Rupertinium: A Fly in the House was a characteristically multifarious installation of chain curtains, painted papier mâché sculpture, live models and found objects.

At the time of his death, Bradshaw was based in Paris and poised to embark upon new work based on The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, an appropriately dark, erotic image created nearly two centuries earlier by another mercurial artist who also died too young. His sons survive him.

Philippe Edward Bradshaw, artist, born December 26 1965; died August 25 2005
Louisa Buck