Anthony Dolphin
New Graft, 2006-2022
Digital collage on paper

Anthony Dolphin (born Tittensor, 1968) is an insignificant figure in the history of European art and is likely to remain
so for many millennia.

He pretends to take solace in the Napoleonic reckoning that “glory is fleeting but obscurity lasts forever" and the construction of biographies written in the third person. He was belatedly awarded a controversial, first-class degree
in Fine Art from the University of Reading in 1992 after he was arrested for sending a letter bomb to his tutor, Roger Cook, and having his dissertation seized by the police. An appeal by Terry Frost and others in the department saved him from expulsion and further prosecution.

On the sound advice of Stewart Home’s Art Strike, Dolphin stopped making visual art for a number of years, gaining Masters' degrees in both Aesthetics and Linguistics, living and working in Greece and Japan, and writing and performing with the cult Anglo-Japanese band, Santa Sprees - making music "largely without modern parallel".

Dolphinfirst began making torn paper collages from film and pop star studio portraits as a teenager and has continued
to make work in this mode in the series ‘New Graft’ – a selection of which can be seen in ‘Cover Versions’. The five record sleeves that make up ‘An Elaborate Cover Story For Music That Might Not Even Exist’ are wholly explained by their title.
Of this work and others Anthony says, “even terrible art and music transcend the earthbound tyranny of words. Why would I want to anchor it with the gravity and inadequacy of explanatory text?”

Dolphin attaches no importance at all to the production and reception of his work, selling it directly in the manner of Jad and David Fair, Jerry Smith, and Jeff Zenick. A political act compensating for the emptiness and social disengagement of his work. He is the older brother of the much better known and more committed artist, Graham Dolphin.

Santa Sprees Bandcamp
Anthony Dolphin website