Born in 1960, Joe Rush has forged a unique place for himself in British contemporary art by constructing extraordinary animals, birds and beasts out of discarded or recovered machine components, automobile parts and other engineering detritus. Drawing his influences from anarchic cult classics such as Judge Dredd comics and the Mad Max movies, in 1984 Rush co-founded the peripatetic multi-media art collective Mutoid Waste Company.

This underground roadshow of like-minded individuals travelled widely though Western and Eastern Europe, constructing ambitious installations and large-scale art spectacles out of found objects. Typically, the group would discover an abandoned warehouse or other redundant…

Born in 1960, Joe Rush has forged a unique place for himself in British contemporary art by constructing extraordinary animals, birds and beasts out of discarded or recovered machine components, automobile parts and other engineering detritus. Drawing his influences from anarchic cult classics such as Judge Dredd comics and the Mad Max movies, in 1984 Rush co-founded the peripatetic multi-media art collective Mutoid Waste Company.

This underground roadshow of like-minded individuals travelled widely though Western and Eastern Europe, constructing ambitious installations and large-scale art spectacles out of found objects. Typically, the group would discover an abandoned warehouse or other redundant industrial building which would serve for an indeterminate period as their home, studio, playground, workshop and party venue. 

Joe Rush has become familiar to thousands of visitors to Glastonbury Festival for his car circles and other heavy-duty phantasmagoria, often exhibited in his own field. He is well-known in Germany where he was active after the fall of the Berlin Wall and has also worked extensively in Japan and elsewhere.

In recent years, Joe’s work has received widespread critical attention, both in the UK and around the world, and his sculptures, some of which he has begun to have cast in bronze in varying sizes, are now highly sought after. He counts Damien Hirst among collectors of his work.

Picasso once managed to evoke a bull’s head through the simple juxtaposition of an old leather bicycle seat and a pair of handlebars. Joe Rush has a similarly acute eye for postmodern collage. The robust, muscular nature of his creative practice cannot obscure his remarkable facility in capturing the essence of an animal or bird through the judicious joining of industrial junk.