Stuart Croft

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Stuart Croft (born 1970, Leeds, UK) is an artist and filmmaker. He attended Newcastle Polytechnic, Wimbledon School of Art and Chelsea College of Art in London, graduating with an MA in 1998. His work has since been shown widely in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Croft writes and directs dialogue-based, character-driven films that are shown in art galleries, as installations or single-screen projections. As such his work asks what the possibilities are for co-opting the languages of cinema and dominant narrative modes into the context of the contemporary art space.

Croft's films are shot to appear as though they are convincing 'slices' of movies, adopting mainstream cinematic or televisual genres to do this: the Hollywood thriller, Hammer Horror, the road movie, film noir, the Western, the film trailer and the TV commercial. In their script-writing, editing and in the gallery space, his works operate as recurrent loops, compounding his quotidian characters into endless repetition and lack of resolve. Whilst Croft's films may look like cinema, their endlessness excludes them from the cinema, and removes any promise of dramatic trajectory.

Croft's work has been reviewed by Time Out London, The Guardian newspaper, ArtForum Magazine, I-D Magazine, Metro newspaper, Contemporary Magazine and many others. Various institutions have held retrospective screenings of his work including FACT, Liverpool, UK and the Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy. He is currently a Tutor and Teaching Fellow at the Royal College of Art in London.