My father, George Foster, who has died aged 64 from cirrhosis of the liver, was an artist and teacher who built assemblages – works that merge sculpture with painting.
Born in Liverpool, George was the eldest of five children. His mother, Dolores (nee Walton), was a priest’s housekeeper from Ireland, and his father, also George, was an antiques dealer. After attending St Mary’s college in Crosby, in the late 1960s George attended Southport art school; among his contemporaries there was the comedian Alexei Sayle, and the pair became good friends. It wasn’t until George enrolled on the sculpture course at Wimbledon art school (1970-73) that he began to combine his love for poetry with making things and creating sculpture.
George started working as an artist’s assistant to Ivor Abrahams (1973-76) and moved into a studio in Phipp Street in central London. With an Arts Council grant he put on his first show, which received positive reviews from the art historian and critic Richard Cork. George then joined the painting course at the Royal College of Art (1976-79), where he started making drawings that layered text over colour, using lyrics from songs and assembling wall-hung sculptures. In 1979 he had a residency for a year in Berlin, where he was commissioned to make a giant flag for the city of Rottweil, and was invited to Warsaw, where he had his first solo exhibition, Flight of Birds, Flock of Thoughts, at the Repassage gallery.
When he returned home to London from Berlin he took over the basement room in a squat at Queen’s Gate in Kensington, and started to make box sculptures that drew imagery from ideas of performance: the circus, Mardi Gras, carnival, dancers and Chinese conjuring tricks. Norman Stevens selected one of these works for an exhibition at the Flowers Gallery in London. Stevens and George were an integral part of a group of artists in the late 70s that would argue through their ideas in the Queen’s Elm Tavern in Chelsea.
In the early 80s George set up City Artists, a project supported by Hackney council that provided studios for eight resident artists along with a large exhibition space. Between 1985 and 1987 he put on more than 80 shows with some of the most exciting local and international emerging artists of that time. By the late 80s he had begun teaching at Kingston Polytechnic in south-west London and continued to do so until 1997. City Artists evolved into Sculpture House, a charity that provided studios and exhibition space for artists in Kingston, which George managed between 2001 and 2011. After that he moved to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, where he cooked for his family and worked on the garden.
He is survived by his two sons, Barnaby and me, from a marriage that ended in divorce.
