安格斯．费尔赫斯特1966年出生于英国肯特郡，在坎特伯利艺术学院修读一年后，便于1989年入读伦敦金匠学院，期间跟达明安‧赫斯特成为好友。1988年两人合作构思和策划了影响深远的创意展览「凝」。
费尔赫斯特的作品形式多样，从雕塑到录像以至绘画都有，作品带挑衅性，表现别具一格的幽默风趣。费尔赫斯特十分重视过程，一贯主张建构是凌驾于意向的创作方法。多年来，他创作了不少拟人绘图，作品经常出现大猩猩的形象。猩猩的可取之处，在于达尔文进化论的观点—牠可以替代人类，几乎拥有人的形象却没有人格的塑造。在费尔赫斯特的绘图中，猩猩打扮会被解开并露出内里的东西，比如是一条小鱼之类。当这些私人绘画被公开展出时，就会为猩猩形象带来生命，成为艺术家的第二个自我。录像《一套廉价不合身的猩猩装》(1995)拍摄了艺术家穿着一套猩猩装发狂地上窜下跳的情况，随后猩猩装开始撕裂分解，内里填塞的报纸脱落，直至艺术家全身裸露为止，而这时所有的幻象亦告烟消云散。
青铜雕塑《思想和感觉之间的几个区别II》(2003)描述了一只猩猩盯着那只躺在地板上的断臂，彷佛在思考：「它真是我的吗？那真是我吗？」在费尔赫斯特的作品里，身体可能是脆弱内在的强力保护，或是令人失望的牢笼，而后者往往更为普遍。
费尔赫斯特曾参予不少重要展览，包括与达明安‧赫斯特以及莎拉．卢卡斯等合作的「In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida」(泰特英国美术馆，伦敦，2004)；「闪耀！伦敦新艺术」(沃尔克艺术中心，明尼阿坡里斯，1995)。2008年，费尔赫斯特在莎迪．科尔斯画廊的作品展，不幸地成为这位艺术家生前最后一次展览。就在展出即将完结之际，费尔赫斯特结束了自己的生命。其主要作品回顾展于布里斯托的阿尔诺菲尼艺术中心(2009)以及比利时的鲁汶美术馆(2010)举行。
Angus Fairhurst was born in Kent in 1966 and studied at Canterbury Art College for one year before attending Goldsmiths College in London in 1989, where he formed a close friendship with Damien Hirst. Together they conceived and organised the seminal exhibition Freeze in 1988.
Working across a wide range of media from sculpture to video to painting, Fairhurst’s works display his idiosyncratic humour in inventive and provocative ways. Process also played a central role in his work and he consistently adhered to structure as a means of subjugating intentionality to the action of making. The artist had been engaged for some years in producing a series of anthropomorphic drawings, often using the figure of a gorilla engaged in a narrative cycle. The gorilla's appeal is that it can stand in for the human figure in a Darwinian sense, possessing near human form, but does away with the need for characterisation. In Fairhurst’s drawings, a gorilla suit would open up to reveal, for example, a little fish inside. When these essentially private drawings finally began to be shown, the gorilla image was brought to life and adopted by the artist as a form of alter ego. A series of actions in the video A Cheap and Ill-fitting Gorilla Suit (1995) shows the artist in a gorilla suit jumping up and down maniacally. The suit begins to disintegrate, shedding newspaper stuffing in the process, until the artist is revealed naked and all sense of illusion dispelled.
In a bronze sculpture, A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling II (2003), a gorilla stares at its arm, which lies severed on the floor. It looks as though it is thinking “Is that really mine? Is that really me?” Thus the body in Fairhurst’s work is represented either as a kind of strong protection for the slippery fragile thing inside, or, more commonly, as a disappointing prison.
His work featured in numerous landmark shows including In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida with Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, Tate Britain, London, 2004 and Brilliant! New Art from London, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 1995. In 2008, a showing of new work at Sadie Coles Gallery was sadly to be his last as a living artist as shortly before the closing of the exhibition, Fairhurst tragically took his own life. A major retrospective exhibition of Fairhurst’s work has since been shown at Arnolfini, Bristol, 2009 and M Museum Leuven, Belgium in 2010.