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Sculptor Joe Rush was born in London in 1960.

In 1984, he founded the Mutoid Waste Company a punk, libertarian travelling arts collective of wild and subversive performers driven by an ideal of freedom embodied in an inseparable trilogy:

the art, the parties, the road.

The art was his spectacular installations of machines and sculptures made of mechanical military and industrial scrap.

The parties, the legendary illegal raves with an apocalyptic aesthetics, they organized and staged in London and Glastonbury Festival, defying Thatcher’s regime.

The road was their political exile that took the company from London

to Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan and Barcelona and influenced numerous European counter cultures.

Joe’s museums and galleries were the free parties the Mutoid Waste Company organised in derelict warehouses, disused factories and buildings that they occupied and mutated. There, he introduced

his “art of salvage”.

In June 1989, in Görlitzer Bahnhof, in West Berlin, he mutated the heavy artillery from the Cold War into a garden of sculptures of peace. A year later, with a Mig 21 stolen from the Russian army camps and planted in the No Man’s Land in front of the Reichstag, he celebrated the end of the Cold War.

From Carhenge and Mount Recyclemore to the mechanical and monumental Phoenix performing atop the Rolling Stones concert stage; from the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games that he art directed to the fields of the iconic Glastonbury of which he is a creative director, his art bears the mark of the creativity, freedom, anarchy, excitement, the fight and the repression, the subversion and the rallying power of a movement which has become European and continues to inspire film, fashion, and live events worldwide.

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