YUPPIE / Richie Culver (UK) solo exhibition & live show




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.
After leaving school, he worked in a caravan factory, financing his growing love for club culture. A breakthrough moment came when he encountered Nan Goldin’s photographs at one of the after-parties, where “through dense skunk smoke, over the chaos magic incantations of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge” he recognized something in the world viewed through Goldin’s lens. Discovering that Throbbing Gristle had formed in the same city became “an epiphany that would spell a sea change for the artist at his most embryonic.”
Years spent at Hull institution The Lamp led to a brief DJ career in the early ’90s and relocation to Berlin, where he “haunted Berghain every single Sunday.” After a break and starting a family, Culver returned to music, describing his spoken word as “like my paintings speaking” — his “emotionally charged machine music” unfurls as a sonic extension of his text-based paintings.
His art has a strong autobiographical character, addressing themes of social class, contemporary masculinity, and technology’s impact on identity. The exhibition “Leisure & Tourism” is a return to youth and reflection on unfulfilled ambitions, while “YUPPIE” examines “aesthetic and psychological debris of late capitalist aspiration” through “typographic severity and lo-fi imagery” as a “mode of resistance.”