1. Nick Gentry's art is influenced by the development of consumerism, technology, identity and cyberculture in society, with a distinctive focus on obsolete media.
26 Facts About Nick Gentry
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Nick Gentry tries to avoid identifying age, gender and race and said his portraits are 'like a void to be filled' which enable people to bring their own identities to his work.
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Nick Gentry's work has been exhibited alongside established contemporary Young British Artists Mark Quinn, Damien Hirst, and Tracey Emin and with notable street artists, such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey and Blek le Rat.
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Nick Gentry was born in Hampstead, London and grew up in the nearby market city of St Albans.
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Nick Gentry spent much of his childhood drawing and sketching.
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Nick Gentry continued to study art at Ridge Street Art School and the University of Hertfordshire.
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Nick Gentry was later refused admission to Liverpool College of Art when he first applied, but attended the college after a subsequent application a year later.
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Nick Gentry has used X-rays for the darker tones, noticeably in the hair section of the images which are back lit with LED.
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Nick Gentry observes that "today we go to great lengths to create a digital identity in addition to the actual lives we live, with the belief that these online records are only growing in importance and will outlive us".
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From 29 June until 6 September 2015 a commissioned sculpture by Nick Gentry was publicly displayed in the Barbican Centre in London.
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In June 2017 Nick Gentry was one of six international artists invited to participate in a collaboration with World Wide Fund for Nature and Tiger Beer in an effort to highlight the harmful effects of illegal tiger trade, a cause of the shrinking tiger population.
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Nick Gentry visited the Mondulkiri Protected Forest in Cambodia in search of wild tigers, but thanks to poaching, there has been no sighting of tigers for the past decade.
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In 2021 Nick Gentry added to his longstanding WWF collaborations with a series of portraits titled 'Protectors of the Amazon'.
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In 2010 Nick Gentry's first show took place in a small studio space in Soho, London at Studio55 Gallery.
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In 2011 Nick Gentry had his first solo exhibition in the US at Robert Fontaine Gallery in Miami.
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Later that year Nick Gentry had a solo exhibition at Whisper Gallery in London, titled Dataface.
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Selfridges featured a pop-up show of Nick Gentry's works, titled Artefacts.
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In 2012 Nick Gentry took part in a large scale urban art group show titled Urban Masters, in an East London warehouse.
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Nick Gentry created a replica of Bowie's red Fender guitar using original film negatives of David Bowie, although it remains unknown if the negatives were contributed by Bowie himself.
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In 2014 Nick Gentry appeared in the BBC Two documentary Making Art Work.
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Nick Gentry explains that Duchamp placed this object in a gallery and called it art, therefore artists should not be restricted by materials such as canvas but feel free to re-use materials.
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Nick Gentry took part in his first group show in New York at C24 Gallery.
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Nick Gentry's work featured for the first time in Hong Kong at the group exhibition Urban Renewal at Opera Gallery alongside artists Seo Young-Deok, Olivier Dassault and Yves Krief.
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Nick Gentry used a combination of outdated media including crushed data CDs, floppy disks and film negatives to "communicate the feeling of time passing, which is a really difficult thing to describe" with words alone.
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Later that year Nick Gentry continued to experiment with using record sleeves in his large scale montage portraits at his first solo show in Paris at Opera Gallery in the exhibition 'ID Merge'.
26.
Nick Gentry returned to Robert Fontaine Gallery in 2023 for the 15th solo show of his career.