Anthony Dolphin (born Tittensor, 1968) is an insignificant figure in the history of European art and is likely to remain so for many millennia so he pretends to takes solace in the words of Napoleon Bonaparte ("glory is fleeting but obscurity lasts forever") and the construction of website biographies written in the third person.

Obscurity wasn't the objective of course and for a period it seemed notoriety could offer the route to significance artists so crave. Indeed the transgressive period (1988-1994) contains moments of which he is most proud. He was belatedly awarded a controversial first class degree in Fine Art from the University of Reading in 1992 after he was arrested for sending a letter bomb to his tutor, Roger Cook, and having his dissertation seized by the police. An appeal by Terry Frost and others in the department saved him from expulsion and further prosecution. Despite this incident and other disciplinary problems, he was praised for his "highly idiosyncratic and intense development as a painter". He stopped making visual art for a number of years, gaining Masters' degrees in both Aesthetics and Linguistics, living and working in Greece and Japan, and writing and performing with the cult Anglo-Japanese band, Santa Sprees, critically-revered by the likes of John Peel and WFMU and making music "largely without modern parallel" but never really designed for mass crossover appeal of the type that buys you houses and holidays. 

Much of Dolphin's work in the last fifteen years has been made under conditions and limitations determined before the execution of the painting or print: a motif, a strict time limit; the number of permitted strokes, the number of colours and brushes used etcetera. The resulting process, an immediacy of acting and responding anchored by habit, has parallels with the tics and forward resolutions found in improvised music. None of which means anything until it does.

Dolphin attaches no importance at all to the production and reception of his work, selling it directly in the manner of Jad Fair, Jerry Smith and Jeff Zenick. A political act compensating for the new auratic emptiness and social disengagement of his work. Along with Toby Heys, Mike Marshall and Jen Southern, Anthony Dolphin was a founder member of the Affinity Group of artists and has exhibited in Europe, Japan and the United States. He is the older brother of the much better known and more committed artist, Graham Dolphin.