Obituary, Gordon Fazakerley

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Text & images by Hugh Mayo, with input from Gordon's family and friends.
The Guardian have also published an obituary on Gordon, which can be found here.


Gordon Fazakerley, born February 11th 1937 in Widnes, died 22nd May 2011 in Copenhagen.

Gordon Fazakerley, the artist died on May 22nd in Rigshospital Copenhagen of heart disease. He was an important figure in Scandinavian Situationism in the 60s and played the role of an outsider in Danish art for many years.

He was born in Widnes on the River Mersey in 1937. Aged 11 he started at a Catholic grammar school, reading philosophy books in the library and learning to draw and paint. Despite family opposition, he enrolled at the nearby Liverpool College of Art in 1951 where he learned about the currents of modern European art in an environment influenced by artists from Hitler's Germany. In 1954 he continued at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London where he came into contact with some of the capital's leading intellects.

His first major exhibition was in 1959 when Lawrence Alloway and Herbert Read organised a solo Gordon Fazakerley exhibition in London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. After meeting him there, Jørgen Nash was later to describe him as “one of the few English artists with a sense of the European, and one of the few who is not on the American aid program. He also has a touch of the poet.”

Gordon never liked American Pop Art. He used winnings from his part-time bookmakers job to travel north to visit his college friend Hard Strid in Halmstad. In 1962 they became two of the eight founder members of the Bauhaus Situationists at Asger Jorn's farm 'Drakabygget'. He became editor of the breakaway Situationist Times. After meeting the Danish journalist Ulla Borchsenius at Drakabygget he settled with her in Copenhagen where they have lived ever since. Gordan has written "Copenhagen is the most northerly extreme of Europe, further north there are only trees and settlements. It is outside the great game of things - a place where one can work in peace. There's not much else to do." He worked in peace unaffected by events in the world of Danish art. As his wife said, " .... he has used and abused the Danish indifference as his own private Berlin Wall." Within that wall he created paintings based on the books he read and the music he heard. The most important challenge was to master the material, the tools and the methods of expression.

His images are generally in the style of post-war abstract expressionism, but their distinctiveness lies in their reaction and contradictions which show in the struggle with the technical limitations. His pictures do not provide a conclusion and you come back to them again and again.

Gordon had many solo exhibitions in England, Italy, Sweden and Denmark and took part in group exhibitions in England, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and Denmark. They culminated in a major retrospective in 1999-2000 at what is now Museum Jorn in Silkeborg.

Personally he was charming and in his conversations he was full of witty and unusual ways of seeing things. A fan of Monty Python, his humour has been described by his friends as unpredictable, ever present, non PC, disrespectful, naughty, acidic, realistic and very Merseyside.

Many were surprised by the breadth of his learning. He tended to be self-effacing and unpretentious but with a low tolerance for stupidity.

Visitors were struck by the variety of his work. Up to the last he served traditional Northern dishes to visitors and joked modestly about cataloguing his extant paintings. He also created his own funeral ceremony.

Gordon Fazakerley is survived by his wife Ulla, children David and Susan, and two grandchildren.