Biography

Graduating with an MA in Fine Art from Manchester Polytechnic, in 1980 Brian Fell was awarded a Fellowship in Sculpture at Cheltenham Art College. Early in his artistic career he was inspired by the abstract steel sculpture of his tutor Mike Lyons and the work of Anthony Caro and David Smith. As a student, Fell created imagery that referenced engineering and ship building, drawing on his childhood years growing up near Liverpool docks and his fascination with industrial machinery. As a young sculptor, he was awarded an Arts Council funded Artist in Industry Fellowship in a steelworks in Sheffield, where he was surrounded by the drama and spectacle of steel production. This inspired and enriched his work with steel.

In 1990 he held a Henry Moore Fellowship at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park part of a long association with the park where he also worked closely with the Founding Director, Peter Murray for over a decade, siting major exhibitions and working with leading international artists on the presentation of their work. Through this experience he developed a keen sense of how to place objects in a landscape alongside a high level of technical skill and problem solving which has contributed to the development and success of his own work. His academic knowledge of the history of sculpture alongside an encyclopaedic understanding of the industrial uses of steel and traditional metalwork techniques and designs inform his ability to work in a wide range contexts.

Since the early 1990s, he has worked full time as an artist, undertaking public and private commissions. In 2011 he relocated his studio to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where he and his son George, trading as Brian Fell and Son, make their own individual work and fulfil commissions, whilst also providing specialist metal fabrication for the Park and its exhibiting artists.  

You can see Brian’s work in towns and cities all over England and Wales. See the Selected works page for more information. He has had two solo exhibitions at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (1990 and 2020). Examples of his work were included in Show your Metal at the Millenium Galleries Sheffield in 2024 and the New Light Summer Exhibtion of the North in Leeds in 2025. A show exploring all of his work, including pieces by his son George, will open at the Atkinson in Southport in June 2026.