Stuart Semple (b.1980) is one of the most critically and commercially successful British artists of the post YBA generation. He has been recognized by The Times, i-D, BBC, Esquire, GQ, L’Uomo Vogue, Art News, ArtForum and others. Stuart’s works can be found in the Getty, Niarchos and David Roberts collections. He also counts Debbie Harry, Sienna Miller and Jean Charles de Castelbajac amongst his celebrity collectors and supporters. Semple regularly exhibits worldwide.

He has been producing art since the age of 3; his abilities were recognized and encouraged early on by his parents and teachers. During his childhood he won several art prizes including a prize where he switched on the Christmas lights in the small seaside town of Bournemouth where he was born and raised. His childhood was spent mostly as a loner surrounded by his paints and Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson and Madonna courtesy of a little red 80s boombox that his mother bought him.

In November 1999 Stuart suffered a near death experience in which he officially died for several seconds late at night alone in a hospital bed, caused by an unknown allergy. He survived and left hospital with a burning desire to be an artist. Following that he exhibited in every café, bar, nightclub, bookshop or alternative space that would have him, even renovating the odd burned out warehouse along the way if necessary, normally selling nothing. Stuart wasn’t snatched up by a big gallery after a degree at a top art school, he didn’t win a reality TV show, he wasn’t born with a celebrity surname or trust fund, he just worked really hard and practiced his craft every day.

It wasn’t until Stuart was 21 that he found himself with his first proper solo gallery show in London. It was a resounding success with almost all the work selling out.  However he would have to wait until 2004 to explode properly on the contemporary art scene. A wave of controversy caused by a sculpture commissioned by Uri Geller would for better or worse bring his name to the masses. Stuart’s piece was a memorial to the works lost when a large art storage facility in East London burned to the ground. Pieces lost to the fire included works by Hirst and also Tracey Emin’s now iconic ‘tent’. Semple’s sculpture titled ‘R.I.P /  Y.B.A’ (an acronym for the young British artists of the Saatchi generation) incorporated rescued burned remains of the artworks presented in 8 Perspex boxes. The controversy followed him into his next endeavour in 2005 when he smuggled and hung his own painting titled “British Painting Still Rocks” in the Saatchi gallery as a protest to Charles Saatchi’s comment that young British artists would be nothing more than a footnote in the history of art.

Commercial success soon followed with Stuart’s London exhibition ‘Epiphany’ (2006) taking over $1 Million in sales. However, it was his curatorial projects “The Black Market’ in NYC and ‘Mash-ups’ at The Design and Artists Copyright Society (London) that caused critics to sit up and listen to Stuart’s argument that “pop culture is a powerful vehicle for real meaning… after all it’s an almost universal language that we are most fluent in”.

During 2007’s Frieze Art Fair the doors opened to Semple’s most ambitious production to date. A 30,000 square foot warehouse in the East End of London became ‘Fake Plastic Love’, an exhibition of gigantic billboard size paintings in an environment more like an arena rock concert than an art exhibition. The show broke the $1 Million sales mark within the first five minutes and attracted over 10,000 visitors. The Financial Times declared Stuart to be ‘The Basquiat of the noughties’, the Independent newspaper placed him within the top 20 artists and ArtNews drew the comparison between Semple and Hamilton exactly 50 years after the latter had defined pop art.

In 2009, at the lowest point of the recession, Stuart used a never seen before technology to float some 2000 pink foam, eco-friendly smiley clouds from Tate Modern towards London’s financial district in an attempt to simply “cheer people up a bit”. A performance he repeated in Milan during the Salone del Mobile in Milan’s Piazza della Scala.

Semple’s hyper-prolific output continued in 2008 and 2009 where he collaborated on various artistic projects with the likes of Umbro, Moncler, The Prodigy, Evisu and Levis. He also held a solo exhibition across three floors of the iconic London department store Selfridges during 2008’s Frieze Art Fair.

Just a decade after his near death experience, the controversy that once surrounded Stuart Semple has faded, leaving one of the most acclaimed and relevant new voices in contemporary art; the same wit and conceptual approach as the YBAs before him, coupled with a genuine technical painterly ability. All the while proving that pop culture doesn’t have to be vacuous or shallow and that in fact it is capable of transmitting deep meaning beneath its surface.

Stuart is currently preparing for his new London exhibition in April 2010.