Guy Denning was born in North Somerset, England in 1965. Denning had various jobs from the age of 20, to support his family, while continuing to paint. Since he grew up in a Somerset village outside Bristol and saw the local rural economy crumble throughout the 1980s, he has been interested in responding to society in one type of political narrative or another. With his discovery in 1980 of the bands CRASS, The Dead Kennedys and Poison Girls, Denning associated himself with the second wave of punk and saw the light in terms of street art. Following the stenciled text aesthetic and anarchist politics of the band CRASS, and the photo-montage vision of artist Gee Vaucher, Denning started peppering west-country towns with his particular paste-up style and sometimes surreal political messaging. In a time when graffiti was generally defined by a US styled, hip-hop inspired vision Denning would frequently challenge what seemed to him then as a style with little political content. His preferred attack was to simply stencil the word “WHY?” next to this ‘traditional’ graffiti that he found when carrying his paint and stencils. With his painting Denning uses not only powerful brush strokes to express himself but also scratches and tears the paint and surface to an extent where he has had to crudely stitch it back together. He frequently adds stenciled and collaged text to oil paintings. His work is held in several other public collections, including the Politics Department of Bristol University, the Political Science Department at Galway University, the MAGI’900 Museum of Contemporary Art, Bologna and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest.
Since 2007 Guy Denning has lived, and continues to work, in Finistere, France.
