Artist from Hull in northern England, raised in a working-class family without contact with art, whose work encompasses visual arts and electronic music. Culver grew up on the outskirts of Hull, struggling with “anxiety, aimlessness and low self-esteem,” ultimately finding his artistic voice in abandoned warehouses and dilapidated flats of the local rave scene.

In YUPPIE, Culver explores the aesthetic and psychological remnants of late-capitalist aspiration, institutional presence, and technological friction. The exhibition employs a restrained, disciplined visual form—severe typography, repetition, and low-quality, grain-saturated images—placing these elements within a critical reflection on the collapse of symbolic stability in contemporary life. The titular term, drawn from the cultural lexicon of the 1980s, functions not as nostalgia but as critique: a signifier of professional ambition and social mobility reframed through disillusionment, stagnation, and a flattened future horizon.

Culver’s work draws on visual strategies that recall the raw aesthetics of underground subcultures, particularly industrial and noise music, where distortion and degradation become tools of expression. This formal language operates not merely as a stylistic choice, but as a form of resistance—privileging entropy over clarity, erosion over legibility. Figures of authority, consumer technologies, and aspirational identities appear not as coherent subjects, but as spectral forms—anonymous, repetitive, and disintegrating.

Rather than narrativizing decline, YUPPIE constructs a quiet, unresolved space of tension between the ideological remnants of upward mobility and the lived reality of cultural and economic inertia. Culver offers a meditation on the banal mechanics of control, the exhaustion of ambition, and the persistent friction of everyday life in systems that no longer deliver on their promises.