Dada l05: Martin Firrell is a British contemporary artist known for public artworks on billboards around the world. He uses the poster form to campaign for greater social equality. His bold and simple works address LGBT+ equality, the women’s movement, feminism and gender equality; and universal human rights. The artist's aim is 'to make the world more humane'. Firrell's billboards often resemble advertising because he hijacks advertising's techniques to achieve artistic-activist ends. This co-opting of commercial techniques and his wholesale colonisation of advertising’s oldest and boldest medium - the billboard - makes Firrell one of the most apposite and significant artists of the 21st Century. ~ Dr Robert Shelton.

Martin Firrell

British, born 1963

Martin Firrell is a British contemporary artist known for public artworks on billboards around the world. He uses the poster form to campaign for greater social equality. His bold and simple works address LGBT+ equality, the women’s movement, feminism and gender equality; and universal human rights. The artist's aim is 'to make the world more humane'. Firrell's billboards often resemble advertising because he hijacks advertising's techniques to achieve artistic-activist ends. This co-opting of commercial techniques and his wholesale colonisation of advertising’s oldest and boldest medium - the billboard - makes Firrell one of the most apposite and significant artists of the 21st Century. ~ Dr Robert Shelton.

wikipedia entry

catalogue raisonné

Art Is Our Protest Against this Reality

2024

Digital posters
From

Dada 105

1080 x 1920px mp4 video, colour, no sound
Zurich & Basel 2022

Dada 105

marks 105 years since the publication of the first Dada Review in Zurich. These contemporary artworks magnify flaws like tears, uneven inking and foxing in the original Dada pamphlets. The texts re-state aspects of Dada philosophy for our times now that the calamity of war has returned to Europe.

__

Cancel Nationalism Cancel National Languages

2022

Dadaism opposed all aspects of nationalism on the basis that it had helped create the conditions that led to the immeasurable suffering of the first world war.

__

Art Cannot Submit to any Outside Control

2022

Dadaist theory noted that it was impossible for art to submit to any form of outside control and still call itself art. Art's inner sovereignty is the foundation of its strength and the main reason why totalitarian regimes are so afraid of it.

__

Reason Is a Hoax

2022

Rationality, reason, mathematics and science had all been co-opted by the war machine of the First World War. As a consequence, Dadaists considered reason itself to be discredited.

__

there are 7 archive images

Freedom of Expression

All artworks courtesy of the artist. Copyright Martin Firrell 1996-2024. Website copyright Martin Firrell Company Ltd. Registered in England and Wales no.7337269.