Angus Fairhurst, one of the group known as Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.'s, who stirred up the art scene in London and beyond in the 1990s, died on Saturday in Scotland. He was 41 and lived in London.
He committed suicide while walking in a remote area, according to an announcement by Bolton & Quinn, a public relations agency in London; no further details were given.
The Young British Artists were internationally famous in the 1990s for their brash, irreverent and sometimes deliberately vulgar works. Mr. Fairhurst did not achieve the degree of notoriety of some members, notably Damien Hirst. He avoided a signature style but was known for mordantly absurdist humor. Working in collage, sculpture, painting, installation and performance, he repeatedly returned to themes relating to popular culture, processes of creation and destruction, and tension between abstraction and representation.
He created collages by excising words and images of people from advertisements appropriated from bus shelters and subways and layering the results into semiabstract compositions. He also produced comical bronze sculptures representing gorillas in existential dilemmas, like ''The Birth of Consistency,'' in which a great ape gazes at himself in a reflective pool.
A bronze sculpture from 2004 titled ''Undone'' is a realistic, nine-foot-long representation of a peeled banana. One of his most famous works was a 1991 prank in which he networked together the phone lines of leading London art galleries so that they could speak only to each other.
Born in Penbury, Kent, England, in 1966, Mr. Fairhurst earned a fine arts degree from Goldsmiths College in London in 1989. Among his classmates were Mr. Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas, who would go on to become some of the best known of the Y.B.A.'s, along with Tracey Emin, Dinos and Jake Chapman.
In 1988, with Mr. Hirst as chief organizer, Mr. Fairhurst helped mount a show of works by himself and 14 fellow Goldsmiths students in an empty London Port Authority building. The show, called ''Freeze,'' received much media attention, was visited by both Charles Saatchi, the British art collector, and Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate in London, and started the careers of many of its participants.
Since the early '90s Mr. Fairhurst's art has been exhibited in solo shows and major group shows in England and Europe. In 1995 he was included in '' 'Brilliant!' New Art From London'' at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 2004, Mr. Fairhurst united with Ms. Lucas and Mr. Hirst to create a collaborative exhibition at Tate Britain called ''In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.'' In New York in the late '90s he had two solo exhibitions at the Anton Kern Gallery and, in 2006, one at the Paul Kasmin Gallery. His last solo show, at Sadie Coles HQ in London, closed on Saturday.
Mr. Fairhurst is survived by his mother, Sally, and a brother, Charles.
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