Angus Fairhurst was one of the group of young art college students and recent graduates who exhibited in the famous independent group show Freeze, which took place in an empty port authority building in the Docklands of London in 1988.

That exhibition introduced the world to a generation who became known — for better or worse — as the Young British Artists (YBAs). Their approach and their ideas — provocative, controversial, inventive — would set the tone for contemporary art in Britain over the next two decades.

Thanks to the artists’ own determined efforts to generate publicity, the show attracted a surprising degree of interest, not least from the influential collector Charles Saatchi. Many of the artists involved went on to enjoy enormous critical and commercial success.

At the time of Freeze, Fairhurst and his friends had just left or were just leaving the celebrated and uniquely cross-disciplinary fine art course at Goldsmiths College in South London. In choosing not to wait for the approval of the established art dealers and gallerists of the day but to show together on their own account in a series of exhibitions mounted by one of their number, Damien Hirst, they showed an enterprise not then particularly common among young artists.

That spirit of enterprise — indeed of entrepreneurship — would continue to characterise their work. At the same time, and for all their differences in temperament, ideas and approach, they would remain, on the whole, what they had been in their college days: a remarkably close-knit, selfreliant and mutually supportive group.

Angus Fairhurst was born at Pembury, Kent, in 1966 and studied at Canterbury College of Art before proceeding to Goldsmiths. Strikingly good looking, he was for several years the boyfriend of one of the more prominent of the Freeze group, the sculptor Sarah Lucas, with whom he made some collaborative works. He was also a great friend of the showman Hirst.

He himself, however, was a more obviously sensitive and delicate artist, one whose work was always a subtle combination of conceptual rigour and a generous formalism. Since Freeze he had exhibited in most of the subsequent important exhibitions of his artistic “generation”; Brilliant at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, 1995, Some Went Mad Some Ran Away, at the Serpentine, 1994; Sensation at the Royal Academy in 1997, and then, more recently, in In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, with Lucas and Hirst at Tate Britain in 2004.

He also had a number of significant one-person shows, notably at Sadie Coles HQ London, and at galleries in New York and Amsterdam.

Fairhurst made work of consistent subtlety and wit. Like his contemporaries, he embraced painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, practical jokes; taking whatever he needed and turning it to his own distinctive ends.

Confident across his whole range of chosen media, he worked often in sets or series of ideas, touching on such subjects as the ubiquity and power of advertising and the mass media, the nature of the self, and the emptiness of expression, but doing so with humour, usually revealed in his titles: Over Lapping Paintings (1996), for instance, was a series of delicate paintings which explored to great effect the movement of repeated pattern over the surface. In A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling (2003) and several other works, he played with the motif of a gorilla, drawing gorillas, sculpting them in bronze, dressing up in a gorilla suit, playing the fool to make serious points about machismo and male grandiosity and to explore the gaps between the artistic subject, the means of representation and the weight of the viewer’s expectations.

Fairhurst’s close attention to form, his careful, often humorous probing of the possibilities of artistic expression, was part and parcel of his delicacy and self-doubt. For all the glib convenience of the YBA label, his work is in reality a world away from the brash theatricality of a Hirst, the cheerful outrageousness of a Lucas, the confident, manipulative self-revelation of a Tracey Emin. A kind and thoughtful man, he was permanently critical of his own work, and never satisfied with what he had achieved.

Recent projects had allowed him to review several layers of his own past, exploring anew many aspects of his earlier work in collage, painting, printmaking, animation and sculpture. Beauty, luxury and sex were among his themes. But art and illusion were his central concerns, along with some serious questions about the nature and value of art itself, and perhaps therefore of the artist, too.

His most recent exhibition, which has just closed at Sadie Coles Gallery, consisted of two very large paintings, executed during and directly after Christmas, a small bronze which seemed to portray the aftermath of some unspecified incident. There was a strong reference to Bernini’s sculpture of Daphne turning into a tree; there was an empty and wrecked prefabricated For Sale sign at eye height, and there were a number of smaller paintings of graphic delicacy and subtle power.

There was, in it all, a strong sense of place — very local, very London — a world of underground walkways, ripped advertising signs from which figures have been removed.

Here as elsewhere, Fairhurst made his works with an awareness of how and where they would appear, in this case alluring and unsettling behind the gallery’s smart facade. Here, as elsewhere, he used his chosen media in a way that worked.

Angus Fairhurst, artist, was born on October 4, 1966. He was found dead in woodland at Bridge of Orchy, Argyll, on March 29, 2008, aged 41