Nancy Fouts obituary

Artist widely acclaimed for her distinctive sculptural works

The artist Nancy Fouts, who has died aged 74, was best known for her distinctive sculptural works, which reconfigure commonplace objects and materials with a characteristically playful and provocative humour.

A “modern-day surrealist”, with a wild imagination and subversive humour, she produced work that brings together seemingly disconnected objects and ideas to revel in the inherent strangeness of the everyday.

Nancy was a key figure in the London art scene, from her days running Fouts and Fowler gallery, off Charlotte Street, in the late 1980s with her then husband, the designer Malcolm Fowler, in parallel to her own art career. She had her first solo show at Angela Flowers gallery on Lisle Street, Soho, in 1970, and more recently exhibited regularly at Pertwee, Anderson and Gold, also in Soho. Last year her show Down the Rabbit Hole at Flowers gallery, Cork Street, Mayfair, coincided with the publication of a monograph.

Nancy was originally a designer and model-maker. In 1967, she and Malcolm had founded the Shirt Sleeve advertising studio. Their workshop produced designs for record sleeves, including for Manfred Mann and Steeleye Span – the album Commoners Crown won Music Week’s award for best designed British album sleeve in 1976 – and worked on campaigns for brands such as Silk Cut, British Airways, Benson & Hedges and Virgin.

Working in the commercial field gave Nancy an acute sense of observation combined with an ability to make striking visual images. Collecting objects to modify was central to her work and, as she herself maintained, her activities as a collector and an artist were interwoven. She was also interested in finding ways of making those inanimate objects seemingly “come to life”, using motorised mechanisms, for instance.

After many years of model-making for the advertising industry, Nancy developed her own ways of creating almost anything, often improvising with whatever materials she had at hand. Unlike many contemporary artists who use technicians to fabricate their works, she rarely used assistants.

Her ideas came from the objects themselves and sometimes wordplay or association inspired by their names. There was often an element of black humour to the work, such as the fusion of an electric chair and a rocking chair in Electric Rocking Chair (2012).

She also looked to works of art and Christian iconography for inspiration. For instance, she subverted Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve (c 1528) with her two diptych paintings Adam and Adam, and Eve and Eve (2014); Exit Jesus (2014) an illuminated sign in which Jesus carries the X of Exit like a cross. Her use of religious imagery, however, was always ironic and playful without being irreverent.

Born in Seattle, Nancy was the daughter of John Fouts, a doctor, and his wife, Margaret. Aged 16 she was sent to London, to a finishing school in Pont Street, Chelsea, called the Three Wise Monkeys, and known as The Monkey Club, because the girls were taught to “hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil”.

In 1963, having married Malcolm the year before, she went to Chelsea School of Art to begin a BA in graphic design, then did her master’s at the Royal College of Art. During that time she got involved with painting shop fronts in Carnaby Street, including theboutique I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet.

Following her graduation, Shirt Sleeve won many awards, including a D&AD gold award for a campaign for the Post Office (1973). Its best known collaboration was the 1986 Tate Gallery by Tube poster, in which the London Underground map was reproduced in trails of oil paint squeezed from a tube.

The couple opened Fouts and Fowler in 1989, exhibiting their own work and that of other artists until it closed after they divorced in 1995. Thereafter Nancy focused on her own artwork.

She was much loved by her fellow artists and was an inspiration to a younger generation. Warm, clever and funny, she was also generous in donating works to raise money for a range of good causes.

She regularly showed with the Gervasuti Foundation at the Venice Biennale (2009-17) and I first included her in an exhibition there, The Knowledge, in 2011. As a curator, I found her a pleasure to work with, because she was practically minded, self-sufficient and ingenious in finding solutions to any technical problems that might arise.

Her home and studio in Camden Town, a former Victorian gothic vicarage, where she lived with her long-term partner, Sophie Jegado, was a vast art installation-cum-cabinet of curiosities.

Her friend the artist Gavin Turk described her: “She would take you excitedly down to her magical workshop in the basement to pull open drawers of feathers, watches, shells, eyeballs and jewellery tools. Her infectious laughter and flashing eyes would sparkle as she described with her maker’s hands her latest conception or discussed the affairs of the day in visual metaphor.”

Nancy is survived by Sophie, and by two sons, Bo and Ben, from her marriage.

Nancy Fouts, artist, born 23 April 1945; died 26 April 2019

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