Cover: Two Men gesturing in the Landscape each with the Chin of Joan Sutherland 1984, oil on canvas, 285 x 285 cm
THE ART OF
Steven Campbell
Steven in his Studio, 1990. Photo: Carol Campbell
THE ART OF
Steven Campbell 13 SEPTEMBER – 21 OCTOBER 2017
Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY
+ 44 (0)20 7629 5161 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com
The Art of Steven Campbell AN INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL BRACEWELL
W
ell into the second decade of the twenty first century it is perhaps hard to imagine the impact, back in 1983 and ’84, of first encountering the art of Steven Campbell. To a viewer new to his work, knowing little or nothing of the artist, or of the recent history of Scottish painting, or the machinations of aesthetic debate within the Scottish art schools, the immediate experience was visceral, declamatory, joyous in its strangeness and originality – a ‘shock of the new’, unexpected, and unlike anything contemporary to it. Campbell, a former steel works maintenance engineer and graduate of Glasgow School of Art, made large figurative paintings that were dramatic, authoritative, compelling, dense with eerie atmosphere and strange goings-on. They depicted stern, dazed, inscrutable or disturbed (at times simultaneously) rather dandified young men, the peculiar archaism of whose appearance and demeanour seemed drawn from a twilight or storm threatened historical crease between the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Often, these young men were engaged in dangerous, bizarre, yet philosophical-seeming hikes through scenery that could have been Highland or Alpine. They looked possessed, their expression conservative and stolidly stony-faced, yet shot through with agitation or anxiety. It was as though these resolute hikers, in their grouse-moor tweeds, shooting socks and stout walking shoes, were concussed into a dream state, blundering through the scenes of an allegorical landscape – a dark surrealist Wonderland – that described, perhaps, the psychic weightlessness of cultural, personal and intellectual vertigo. The romanticism of these figures, therefore – which also seemed deeply literary, even on first impressions – stemmed in part from the contrast between the mad, vice-like situations in which they found themselves held, and the stylized traditionalism of their appearance, personal and sartorial. In a manner akin to how the radical-reactionary suits and ties of Gilbert & George offset their other-worldly poses,
the characters in Campbell’s paintings merged latent madness with received ideas of Edwardian, Georgian, Victorian gentility. And as also in the art of Gilbert & George, this formality of appearance then heightened the chaotic, crazed, comic and visionary scenarios in which these characters were caught. They moved it seemed through landscapes at once symbolic and filled with strange narrative: skewed destabilized versions of early or mid twentieth century fiction: adventure stories, detective mysteries, camping, hiking, summers in the country, school holiday encounters with magical worlds. Their situation appeared wholly non-urban; their surroundings at once numinous, rugged and non-specific – ominous remote versions of the vistas of open country that can often be seen in the background of renaissance portraits. As Campbell’s wanderers, hikers, adventurers progress through dark terrain, the opening of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ seems to describe their route:
“ When half way through the journey of our life I found that I was in a gloomy wood, because the path which led aright was lost. And ah, how hard it is to say just what this wild and rough and stubborn woodland was, the very thought of which renews my fear!” The contortions of these elegant adventurers, caught as though in a Divine Comedy of their own, real or imagined or both, seemed during the middle years of the 1980s to also be describing a cultural situation – to do with painting, its history, and what to paint now; and how and why to paint, or indeed just letting go, artistically, and exploring one’s fancies and obsessions: a magic lantern show of influence, inspirations and feelings. It seemed not so much History Painting, as Endof-History Painting – a postmodern proposition: a lowbeamed smoky ceilinged tea parlor version of Jorg Immendorff’s neo-expressionist ‘Café Deutschland’ series of paintings (1977–1982); but with these conservative-looking young men, intent or deranged within their own arcane enquiries and incidents, that all seemed to have the air of accidents, catastrophes and murder mysteries.
Such might have been an initial impression, at least, of the absurdist-magical-realist world opened up by Campbell’s early, richly toned paintings, made between 1983 and 1987. The broader social and cultural context into which these paintings emerged, moreover, was a strange but stringent mix of political tension, social volatility and, institutionally, at least, somewhat moribund artistic conservatism. The layering of these factors amplified the already stentorian resonance of Campbell’s art, and deepened the arresting mood of turbulent portent – distinct, surrealist, pantomime-like – with which the hauntedseeming tableaux he presented were pervaded. In Britain, the temper of the early to mid 1980s was shaped by an uneasy confluence of shifting and opposing influences, politically and socially. As Margaret Thatcher’s government won a second term in office in the Tory landslide election of June, 1983, there was growing dissent towards policies perceived by many to condemn working class communities and give rise to the highest unemployment figures since the Depression of the 1930s. Concurrent to this state of affairs, and commenting upon them, more often than not, the seemingly trivial subcultural revolution provoked by punk music in the late 1970s had proved seismic in its effects, serving as a more general catalyst for new creative energy, eclecticism, local organization, inventiveness and its own bleak, semi-ironical poetry. This creative power surge occurred not just within rock music, but as part of an entire ideology that hailed its revolutionary and imaginative spirit. Against a backdrop of volatile unrest, therefore – widespread rioting during the summer of 1981, the controversial pursuit of ‘The Falklands War’, the violence attending Miners Strike of 1984 – 1985 – hybrid and experimental forms of creativity began to emerge across the arts in Britain, as though responding to the breaking up of an old order, and the inauguration of a primarily sub-cultural sensibility that was at once brooding and frenetic. From dance to fashion, film, fiction and the growing importation to the UK of critical theory from America and Europe, the themes of postmodernism as a broader term to describe new approaches to narrative, semantics, historic style, psychology and authorship, began – whether consciously or not – to make themselves felt. The institutions of the art world, by comparison, could still appear remote and insular – inclined to academicism and drily formalist, exclusively internal debates. The ‘brutality of fact’ made so real by the genius of Francis Bacon (and likewise explored by the stark, monochromatic streets scenes made by and featuring Gilbert & George, between 1977 and 1982) seemed an exception, as regards contemporary British art, in terms of both subject and intention. The Scottish experience of this period, politically and culturally, was especially singular and intense. Interviewed by Alan Raich in 2013 [1] Alexander Moffat, artist and teacher at Glasgow School of Art during the early 1980s, provided a succinct summary, with reference to Scottish contemporary culture of the time, its relation to its own historical identity, and the emergence of Steven Campbell specifically:
“ ‘Thatcherism’ was an ideology alien to most Scots and even to many on the right of the political spectrum. Much has been written about the cultural opposition to the policies of the Conservative Government in London that broke out in Scotland throughout the 1980s. With no democratic representation at Westminster artists and writers, especially writers, became engaged as never before with the cultural becoming a surrogate for the political. Alastair Gray, struggling to complete his great novel ‘Lanark’, was suddenly ‘unlocked’ to bring it to fruition, and it was published in 1981. Campbell always saw himself as a Scottish artist. Speaking of the New Image painters he said, “Until us, no one ever thought you could be inspired to paint by your own country!” He was never one to hold back, and he continued, “I invented modern Scottish painting – and that’s not egotistical!” Rather than egotistical, this declamatory statement seems to sit with the emergent sense in even his early work of Campbell as a ‘mythic’ figure: that the male characters within his paintings might be viewed in one sense as comic, ceremonial or mock-heroic avatars of the artist himself, embarked on the stages of life’s way, alternately seeker-aftertruth and stooge of cosmic fate. In this, the art of Steven Campbell appears steeped in the devices of myth – but myth presented as nonsense tableaux or illogical charade. In reviewing the cultural history of the first half of the 1980s, it is also worth remembering that the figurative, so-called ‘New Image’ painters (this label taken from the highly influential exhibition, ‘New Image Glasgow’, curated by Alexander Moffat at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, in 1985), to emerge in Scotland towards the middle of the 1980s – notably Steven Campbell, Adrian Wiszniewski and Peter Howson – would be the last young British artists to rise to prominence before the ‘Young British Art’ generation of the later 1980s and early 1990s. The figurative-fantastical mood of Campbell’s art, and its darkling slapstick allegorical sensibility, could thus be said to achieve celebrity during a brief but highly charged generational pause: between an earlier epoch of modernist seriousness, and a new order of conceptualist jest; between, for instance, the abstract sculpture of Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg and Alison Wilding, and film of Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst in an East London bar, dressed as seedy circus clowns, demonic and depressed, exchanging gory anecdotes. This seeming schism or mezzanine in the recent history of British art can seem at thirty years distance to comprise a period of vivid artistic experimentalism and games with style; at times ironical, at others more fixated on a pageantry of dysfunction and decadence. These excursions into postmodern allegory, destabilized history and reprised myth, seem to occupy, in terms of cultural theory, what might be construed as white space on the time-line.
Occurring, notably, alongside the rise to ubiquity of digital technology and the earliest examples of home computing (and thus qualifying as a new form of the Gothic, in terms of matching technological acceleration with a need for mystery and excessively heightened romance) this was therefore a brief but intense period of exercises in postmodernism, framed, in terms of contemporary art, by the untimely deaths in 1986 of Joseph Beuys and a year later of Andy Warhol. And as the deaths of Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin in 1900 had seemed to close the Victorian era, so those of Beuys and Warhol could be seen as the final curtain of international Modernism. Closer to home, one might have looked to the cinema of Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway for what felt like somewhat histrionic reclamations of British neo-Romantic reverie (Jarman’s Last of England (1987)) and Baroque intrigue (Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)) – ‘artistcinema’, alternately neurasthenic and ritualistically violent, yet aesthetically sumptuous and coldly poised. Intellectually ring-fenced by the new cultural criticism of writers as diverse as Umberto Eco and Michel Foucault, this epoch of fervid style appeared to engage above all with rearrangements of narrative, authorship, event and history – all qualities pertinent to figurative art, now suddenly wide open to new and at times audacious interpretation. Seen within this context, the rapid rise to prominence of the art of Steven Campbell can be seen to correlate with a broader mood. Likewise the work of Campbell’s art school contemporary and fellow ‘new figurative’ painter Adrian Wiszniewski, whose liquid eyed, dreamily romantic young men, again caught in seemingly allegorical poses or bizarrely poetic scenes from Scottish-Arcadian fable, might have been the younger brothers of the shock-haired hikers in Campbell’s paintings. This literary-seeming, absurdist-magical-realist, historically self-aware sensibility, culturally prevalent during the second half of the 1980s, might therefore be further summarized as a delight in creating meticulous fables of meaning, at a time when the nature of meaning itself was under much discussion. Between 1983 and 1989, the pictorial ‘climate’ of Campbell’s paintings seemed damp, dark and northern European. A realm of overcast skies, forested or mountain scenery, in which flora and fauna may or may not be agents of the supernatural, but certainly more than indifferent onlookers. Expressionist landscapes and nursery rhyme-Dr Caligari interiors become as weirdly hostile and aggressively combative as destiny or character – cataracts and torrents, mountains and pine trees, dim lit rooms, clearings in the forest. Like a Scottish Germany or vice versa. The titles of Campbell’s paintings might also be read as a short-hand manifesto of their form and sensibility. They are at once poetic, intriguing, syntactically faintly absurd, richly enigmatic and sinister. They are literary, in their semantic selfawareness, and possess the dramatic flourish of surrealism. These qualities are heightened for being in many case directly descriptive of the scenes they title. Their alloy-like fusion of event, activity, iconography, myth and history, further strengthened by ambiguous irony, again
The poisoning and Subsequent paralysis of Abraham von Helsing Johnson 1983, oil on canvas, 266.6 x 243.9 cm
corresponds to the style games of postmodernism. History and cultural iconography are collaged, to create imaginary encounters between the fictitious, the mythic, the comic-absurd and the theoretical. The poisoning and Subsequent paralysis of Abraham von Helsing Johnson (1983) depicts a sturdy, blonde haired young man, with goatee beard and fixed, stern expression. He is dressed in an orange jacket and waistcoat, with moss green shorts, matching knee socks (pulled up to his stocky knees) and almost dainty black lace-up shoes. He carries in one hand a broad-brimmed hat of jade-blue; in the other a briefcase or satchel. It is his expression that first arrests the viewer’s gaze: a look in his eyes that is both vacant and intent, staring directly ahead. He is standing stock still – his pose seems almost ceremonial – beside a small tent that is pitched at the foot of a densely forested mountainside. Some footprints lead either towards him or away from him; it’s difficult to tell, and such ambiguity – “either” and “or” held in suspension – is a frequent narrative device in Campbell’s paintings. We also see a felled sapling, and an axe lying to one side. The precise nature of this occasion is more or less impossible for the viewer to guess: all is inferred, insinuated, hinted towards. All seems at once symbolic and representational. One imagines that this stock staring figure may indeed be the poisoned and paralyzed von Helsing Johnson of the painting’s title – an interpretation of the vampire hunter Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s novel ‘Dracula’ of 1897; but the scene likewise appears dense with gnomic allegory.
In this, Campbell’s paintings have the air of tableaux – as though the figures depicted were players in some surrealist home movie or amateur dramatics performance, and had frozen, mid-gesture, ceremonially, at the conclusion of a scene. Playful, ambiguous and strange, Campbell’s art made in this a truly revolutionary break with contemporary British art of the period, looking as it did to ‘local’ history, cultural mythology and literature for the energy and extravagance of its postmodern imagination. Our experience of these paintings, might thus be likened to that of a charade – but a charade in which the scene being acted out seems at once laden with coded significance and a set of circumstances skewed into surreal meaninglessness. Samuel Hynes, in his book The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (1976) analyses the British poet W. H. Auden’s early works for theatre (those co-written with Christopher Isherwood, influenced by the political cabarets that the two had witnessed in Berlin) in a manner that might easily apply to the sense of scenario, unreality, authorial identity, story‑telling and performance in the art of Steven Campbell. “ The word that Auden used to describe his play is not ‘parable’ but ‘charade’, and it is worth pausing to consider the special kind of parable that this term suggests. A charade is a theatrical form distinguished by three features: it is private – for the entertainment of a small group of persons who know each other; it is a game; and it is non-realistic – in a charade, the actions carry meanings that are not literally representational. Charade, then, identifies qualities that are
A Man with a Floured Head Impersonating A Burning Dovecoat 1985 oil on canvas, 279.4 x 231 cm
noticeable and important aspects of this generation’s writings – the private ‘myth of themselves’, the element of formal play and sometimes clownishness, and the common departure from the realistic rendering of experience.” [2] Paintings by Campbell from the mid-1980s such as A Man with a Floured Head Impersonating A Burning Dovecot (1985) and Two Hunters immobilized by an excessive use of bark camouflage (1985) might epitomize “the element of formal play”, “clownishness” and “common departure from the realistic rendering of experience.” As such they correspond directly to this notion of ‘charade’; and also to the idea of painting as performance, and the artist as character and performer: the Highland dandy as myth, artist and subject. This notion of the ‘charade’ seems increasingly apposite to the understanding of Campbell’s particular, unwavering and highly distinctive approach to art making. Hynes’s definition flags up a fusion of conceptualism, craft, and artist-as-curator/ performer/auteur, in which game-like fictions, self-consciously knowing and semi-theatrical in nature (props, sets, scenery, characters) are realized by and within the artwork – often with meticulous attention to detail, and a dandified commitment to honing (delicious paradox) the verisimilitude of artifice. A Man with a Floured Head Impersonating A Burning Dovecot depicts a seemingly dusk-lit, early evening scene. The moon can be seen through clouds, rising over some barren hills. This mountainous countryside seems sparse, incongruously Biblical. A man in red jacket, dark blue and white tie and belted turquoise trousers is half standing and half leaning beside a smoldering dovecot; there is a somewhat phosphorescent lizard at his feet, and behind him, set back a little, a small tent of the type so often featured in Campbell’s ‘scenes’. Once again, the notion of camping and hiking is in play. The man’s jacket and trousers are torn, as though he is the victim of a recent explosion. Beside him, there are a small vegetable garden with flowering plants and a snapped sapling on which sits an impassive bird. A scarecrow with a disquietingly human head has been knocked flat. The man clutches his forehead, and might seem to have white, rather professorial curly hair. The painting’s title, however, leads the viewer to suppose that the whiteness is ‘floured’. The mood of this painting is sinister and forlorn, while the event it depicts seems as slapstick as anything in a comedy film. This abuttal of the eerie and the absurd seems to enforce the inference of an allegory or ‘charade’. An artists poseable figure appears to be looking up at the man, shaking its fist. Bird, scarecrow, disheveled man, strangely glowing lizard; crazy behavior. Yet the enigma of this scene, in relation to the figurative painting style, with its intimations of story book illustration or ‘folk art’, might also propose the depiction of an event from a story we can only guess – or that the viewer might make up on the basis of the picture. Wide open, historically, to the critical-theoretical reach of postmodernism, Campbell’s paintings may also be seen at thirty years distance as both simpler and stranger – anarchic games with narrative, sign and authorship, intuitive and literal; and narrative in a manner not dissimilar, for example, to the surrealist ‘dream’ stories recounted in some of Bob Dylan’s songs.
The posed impassivity of the two young men in the bizarre mise-en-scene depicted by Two Hunters immobilized by an excessive use of bark camouflage –mixes inscrutability with fable; and the viewer might again speculate that some complex allegory is being acted out by such a constellation of outlandish and strangely ceremonial participants. The visual experience begins also to feel literary: as though one is reading a novella, or a fragment of prose, or lines of poetry. But if this is the case, and if the viewer is unable to de-code with certainty any such literary meaning, then what remains or takes its place is a potent evocation of a dream-like episode and atmosphere: the feeling seems to be of a sense of an ending – of youth, of certainty, of narrative, of terra firma. It is as though the mainspring of Logic in the world of meaning has suddenly snapped and fallen loose, enabling modes and acts and gestures of enquiry that circle around fantasy, epiphany, Utopia, ineffectuality, discovery, anesthesia, delusion, denouement, abandon, crisis and confusion – all depicted by these nerveless but foppish young men, in frieze‑like scenarios. The hybridization of event, mystery, comedy and a form of magic realism is further pronounced – is more arch, perhaps – by Can Abstraction be taken as Evidence in a Murder Scene (1989) The figures appeared poised, arrested in time and space, posed above all; at times as though they were mannequins, arranged to depict a scene, at others as though they were indeed figures in a charade or illustrations from some mystery story or yarn. There is a density to the tonal mood of the painting that makes the landscape appear tense or brooding – awakening with night. This creates a sense of place, enigmatically numinous, in which portent and disaster assume a metaphysical air. For so often the young men in Campbell’s paintings, absorbed, swept along or subjugated by weird scenes, reminiscent of fairy tale or myth, but then skewed into absurdity, seem despite themselves to be (and are sometimes confirmed to be, in the titles of the pictures) seekers-aftertruth, of one sort another. They might be poets, amateur philosophers, witness participants in a dysfunctional ‘Pilgrims Progress’ – or perhaps just observers of these pursuits: chance bystanders, local boys, who had somehow become amnesiac victims, or protagonists in some cosmic game of ‘Cluedo’. Murder mystery becomes art mystery, becomes “the myth of themselves” that Hynes identifies in his definition of the ‘charade’. Pinocchio, the Habit of the Shrike (1990) depicts a dark landscape with fir trees, a stream, toadstools at the foot of some rocks; and a figure that resembles Campbell himself, his face and upper body in semi-shadow, casually yet ritualistically seated on a folding chair, his right hand resting on the handle of an upended tennis racket. A handsomely feathered shrike (a bird that impales insects and small vertebrates on thorns or spikes, in order to tear them into more manageable pieces) perches on a briar. Meanwhile, a gold haired Pinocchio figure, painted limbs scuffed and worn, his ‘liar’s’ nose obscenely and viciously extended to a sharp point, reaches out his long right arm, and impales the seated figure’s stomach with his thin, pointed finger.
(One might wonder, with the benefit of hindsight, whether Pinocchio’s stabbing of the ‘artist’s’ stomach is related to the Gaviscon antiacid medicine seen sixteen years later in Untitled III from the Fantomas Series (2006–07) in which almost hidden hands violently push books off library shelves (labeled ‘Travel Logues’) towards a bearded dandy in painted jacket and leaf green trousers.) The phantasmagorical scenes depicted in Campbell’s art, seem interconnected into a magical, semi-autobiographical narrative. As Neil Mulholland has written [3] with reference to Campbell’s Portrait of the Lost Travelogue Writer (2006/07) : “It is significant that Campbell should here, as he has throughout his career, conceive of himself as an implied author which is to say that the trope of the artist as it appears in (this) painting is a shadow of the ‘real’ artist, a fiction that narrates the paintings in question into being and which often features within them, reminding us that we are viewing a fiction. The Campbell‑actor in this painting is, therefore, more of a magician than an archaeologist; he conjures up values rather than unearth the present.” Stylistically, the art of Steven Campbell explored dark expressionistic figuration, graphic illustrative drawing, mixedmedia assemblage, impressionism, a Matisse-like sun-bleached palette, and towards the end of his life, in 2006 and 2007, a form of hyper-vivid psychedelic realism. But for all these gear-changes, the singular aesthetic charge of Campbell’s art remained constant, and in particular his dedication to painting, and where he, as artist, magician, author ‘Campbellactor’ stood in relation to the act of painting. Making work up to his untimely death in August, 2007, this was a strange, epic journey; an excursion into the private myth of the self, the intensity and mysterious drama of which seems at once visionary and autobiographical.
Notes 1: R iach, Alan and Moffat, Alexander; Paintings as Arguments: Five Decades of Cultural and Political Change in Scotland. Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen, 2014 p. 71 2: Hynes, Samuel; The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. Faber & Faber, London 1976 p. 47 3: M ulholland, Neil; Steven Campbell, ‘…wretched stars, insatiable heaven…’ Marlborough, London 2009 p. 10
Steven Campbell with Bonjour Monsieur Foucault hanging outside the new Tate Liverpool building, c. 1987. Photo Carol Campbell
List of works
1 T he poisoning and Subsequent paralysis of Abraham von Helsing Johnson 1983, oil on canvas, 266.6 x 243.9 cm
11 Portrait of two Cousins with the same Mother who left them alone when she was seventeen 1991, collage on canvas, 149 x 121 cm
2 S earching for Fossils at Night 1984, oil on canvas, 282.3 x 259 cm
12 The Family of the Accidental Angel 1991, collage on canvas, 174 x 121.5 cm
3 Two Men gesturing in the Landscape each with the Chin of Joan Sutherland 1984, oil on canvas, 285 x 285 cm
13 Pinocchio in Chains 1992, acrylic on paper, 175.2 x 106 cm
4 A Man with a Floured Head Impersonating A Burning Dovecoat 1985, oil on canvas, 279.4 x 231 cm 5 Two Hunters immobilised by an excessive use of bark camouflage 1985, oil on canvas, 280 x 280 cm 6 Collagist in the Drama – Mort de Pierrot 1988, oil on canvas, 221 x 236.2 cm 7 The Sadness of Swiss Peasants on the Rhine 1989, oil on canvas, 226.1 x 251.5 cm 8 Can Abstraction be taken as Evidence in a Murder Scene 1989, oil on canvas, 246.3 x 170.2 cm 9 B irth of Eurithia with Drowned Family 1991, collage on canvas, 150 x 120 cm 10 I dreamt I shot Mussolini at Cowes week 1991, collage on paper laid on canvas, 144 x 115.5 cm
14 Pinocchio, the Habit of the Shrike 1992, acrylic on paper, 178 x 149.2 cm 15 Alice in Ruins 1992 – 93, oil on canvas, 269.9 x 263.7 cm 16 The Spider 1992 – 93, oil on canvas, 221.5 x 234.3 cm 17 Murder running through the Woods 1993, oil on canvas, 249.2 x 243.9 cm 18 Chesterfield Dreams – In the Park 1995, mixed media, acrylic and oil on canvas, padding of foam and brass metal pins, the cast plaster is covered in polymer (crystal sheen), 103 x 143 cm 19 Chesterfield Dreams – Harry to Heaven 1995, mixed media, acrylic and oil on canvas, padding of foam and brass metal pins, the cast plaster is covered in polymer (crystal sheen), 122 x 122 cm 20 Four Feet with two things in Common... Gardening and Killing 2001, oil on canvas, 221 x 186.7 cm
21 Her Bower Became a Bow to Twist, Tighten and Throw 2001, oil on canvas, 218.4 x 181.6 cm 22 Pulling the Pope Pushing the Kid 2001, oil on canvas, 210.8 x 203.2 cm 23 Autumn / No Happy Time if you have a Heartbeat 2001, oil on canvas, 223.5 x 228.6 cm 24 His Insides became his Outsides as the Caravan game became erratic 2001, oil on canvas, 219.7 x 229.9 cm 25 Untitled from the ‘Fantômas’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 218 x 217 cm 26 Untitled II from the ‘Fantômas’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 201 x 201 cm 27 Attenti al Cane, al Padrone et tutti la Famiglia 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 188 x 122 cm 28 Untitled from the ‘Extreme Sports’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 223.5 x 193 cm 29 Untitled 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 216 x 173 cm 30 Untitled III from the ‘Fantômas’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 228.5 x 218.5 cm
1 T he poisoning and Subsequent paralysis of Abraham von Helsing Johnson 1983, oil on canvas, 266.6 x 243.9 cm
2 S earching for Fossils at Night 1984, oil on canvas, 282.3 x 259 cm
3 Two Men gesturing in the Landscape each with the Chin of Joan Sutherland 1984, oil on canvas, 285 x 285 cm
4 A Man with a Floured Head Impersonating A Burning Dovecoat 1985, oil on canvas, 279.4 x 231 cm
5  Two Hunters immobilised by an excessive use of bark camouflage 1985, oil on canvas, 280 x 280 cm
6 Collagist in the Drama – Mort de Pierrot 1988, oil on canvas, 221 x 236.2 cm
7 The Sadness of Swiss Peasants on the Rhine 1989, oil on canvas, 226.1 x 251.5 cm
8 Can Abstraction be taken as Evidence in a Murder Scene 1989, oil on canvas, 246.3 x 170.2 cm
9 B irth of Eurithia with Drowned Family 1991, collage on canvas, 150 x 120 cm
10 I dreamt I shot Mussolini at Cowes week 1991, collage on paper laid on canvas, 144 x 115.5 cm
11 Portrait of two Cousins with the same Mother who left them alone when she was seventeen 1991, collage on canvas, 149 x 121 cm
12 The Family of the Accidental Angel 1991, collage on canvas, 174 x 121.5 cm
13 Pinocchio in Chains 1992, acrylic on paper, 175.2 x 106 cm
14 Pinocchio, the Habit of the Shrike 1992, acrylic on paper, 178 x 149.2 cm
15 Alice in Ruins 1992 – 93, oil on canvas, 269.9 x 263.7 cm
16 The Spider 1992 – 93, oil on canvas, 221.5 x 234.3 cm
17 Murder running through the Woods 1993, oil on canvas, 249.2 x 243.9 cm
18 Chesterfield Dreams – In the Park 1995, mixed media, acrylic and oil on canvas, padding of foam and brass metal pins, the cast plaster is covered in polymer (crystal sheen), 103 x 143 cm
19 Chesterfield Dreams – Harry to Heaven 1995, mixed media, acrylic and oil on canvas, padding of foam and brass metal pins, the cast plaster is covered in polymer (crystal sheen), 122 x 122 cm
20 Four Feet with two things in Common... Gardening and Killing 2001, oil on canvas, 221 x 186.7 cm
21 Her Bower Became a Bow to Twist, Tighten and Throw 2001, oil on canvas, 218.4 x 181.6 cm
22 Pulling the Pope Pushing the Kid 2001, oil on canvas, 210.8 x 203.2 cm
23 Autumn / No Happy Time if you have a Heartbeat 2001, oil on canvas, 223.5 x 228.6 cm
24 His Insides became his Outsides as the Caravan game became erratic 2001, oil on canvas, 219.7 x 229.9 cm
25 Untitled from the ‘Fantômas’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 218 x 217 cm
26 Untitled II from the ‘Fantômas’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 201 x 201 cm
27 Attenti al Cane, al Padrone et tutti la Famiglia 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 188 x 122 cm
28 Untitled from the ‘Extreme Sports’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 223.5 x 193 cm
29 Untitled 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 216 x 173 cm
30 Untitled III from the ‘Fantômas’ Series 2006 – 07, oil on canvas, 228.5 x 218.5 cm
Biography 1953 Born in Glasgow 1970 – 77 Steel Works Maintenance Engineer 1978 – 82 Glasgow School of Art 1979 John D. Kelly Memorial Medal, Glasgow School of Art 1982 Bram Stoker Gold Medal, Glasgow School of Art Awarded Fulbright Scholarship, stayed in New York for five years 1986 – 88 Lives and works in Glasgow 1989 Moves to Kippen in Stirlingshire, Scotland 1990 Artist in Residence, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1995 Leverhulme scholarship – travels in Italy 2002 Lives and works in Stirlingshire 2007 Died in Stirlingshire, Scotland 2009 The Steven Campbell Trust, www.thestevencampbelltrust.org set up in Campbell’s memory
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2009
S teven Campbell (1953 – 2007)“….Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven….”, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2008 Steven Campbell (1953 – 2007)“….Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven….” New Work 2006 – 2007, Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow & Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow School of Art 2004 Stephen Campbell: Paintings and Prints, Glasgow Print Studio 2002 The Caravan Club, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh The Caravan Club, Marlborough Fine Art, London 1997 Chesterfield Dreams, Marlborough Fine Art, London; & William Hardie Gallery, Glasgow 1996 Chesterfield Dreams, Pier Arts Centre, Orkney 1995 An American Passion: The Susan Kasen Summer and Robert D Summer Collection of Contemporary British Painting, McLellen Galleries, Glasgow; RCA, London; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 1994 William Hardie Gallery, Glasgow 1993 Pinocchio’s Present, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Marlborough Fine Art, London; South London Gallery 1990 Steven Campbell: On Form and Fiction, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow; Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno; Marlborough Fine Art, London; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Southampton Art Gallery Marlborough Fine Art Ltd.,Tokyo Rex Irwin, Sydney 1989 Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona 1988 Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York 1987 Marlborough Fine Art, London 1986 Galerie Pierre Huber, Geneva John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco 1985 The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh Barbara Toll Fine Art, New York Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Middendorf Gallery, Washington D.C. 1984 Dart Gallery, Chicago; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago Galerie Six Friedrich, Munich Riverside Studios, London 1983 Barbara Toll Fine Art, New York John Weber Gallery, New York
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2016 Summer Exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, London 2014 GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2003 The New Glasgow Boys, The Fleming Collection, London 2001 Le Brun, Campbell, Oulton, Davies, Raab Galerie, Berlin 2000 A Tribute to Edwin Morgan, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 1996 The Scottish Renaissance: Contemporary Painting in Scotland, The Rotunda, Hong Kong 1995 Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow An American Passion: The Susan Kasen Summer Collection and Robert D. Summer Collection of Contemporary British Painting, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow; Royal College of Art, London 1994 Campbell, Le Brun, Oulton, Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York 1992 – 93 The Figure in the City: Urban Themes in New Scottish Painting, Talbot Rice Touring Exhibition; Mia Joosten Gallery, Amsterdam; Muziekatelier Kunstactiviteiten Theatre Aan Het Vrythof, Maastricht; Y’Art and P Gallery, Utrecht, BP Gallery, Brussels; Welsh Arts Council Gallery, Oriel, Cardiff; Arts Gallery, Aberdeen 1991 Kunst Europe – British Art Today, Kunstverein, Baden 1990 Glasgow’s Great British Art Exhibition, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow New North: New Art from the North of Britain, Tate Gallery, Liverpool Now for the Future: Purchases for the Arts Council Collection since 1984, Hayward Gallery, London The Compass Contribution: 21 Years of Contemporary Art, 1969 – 1990, Tramway Gallery, Glasgow British Art Now: A Subjective View, British Council Exhibition, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo; Fukuoka Art Museum and Tochigi Prefectural Art Museum of Arts, Utsonomiya; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art 1989 Scottish Art since 1900, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Barbican Art Gallery, London 1988 Cries and Whispers, British Council Touring Exhibition, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston;
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne The New British Painting, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and tour 1987 Current Affairs: British Painting and Sculpture in the 1980s, British Council Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Mucsarnok, Budapest; National Gallery, Prague; Zacheta, Warsaw British Art of the 1980s, British Council Exhibition, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm; Sarah Hilden Museum, Tampere The Vigorous Imagination – New Scottish Art, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 1986 Neo-Figure, Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona Forty Years of Modern Art 1945 – 85, Tate Gallery, London Britain in Vienna, Kunstlerhaus, Vienna New Visions in Contemporary Art, the RSM Company Collection, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio Metropolitan Museum Travelling Exhibition, Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona 1985 Contemporary Issues III, Holman Art Gallery, New Jersey Large Figurative Drawings, Virginia Museum, Richmond, Virginia Hayward Annual, Hayward Gallery, London New Image Glasgow, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow; Air Gallery, London Selection Two, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1984 – 85 The British Art Show, Arts Council Exhibition, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; City Gallery, Southampton 1984 The New Landscape, Brooklyn Arts and Culture Association at the Downtown Cultural Center Gallery, New York Swimming and Other Pools, Getler/Pall/Saper Gallery; New York The Human Condition: Biennial III, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California La Narrativa Internacional de Hoy, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City 1983 Four Figurative Artists, Barbara Toll Fine Art, New York New Works – New York, Carol Taylor Art, Dallas The Figurative Mode: Recent Drawings from New York City Galleries, Dowd Fine Arts Center Gallery, New York 1982 Group Show, Compass Gallery, Glasgow 1981 Group Show, New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh
BOOKS AND EXHIBITION CATALOGUES
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Moira Jeffrey and Katrina Brown, Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland: Edinburgh, National Galleries Scotland, 2014 Neil Mullholland, Steven Campbell (1953 – 2007)“…Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven…”, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 2009 Duncan Macmillan and Jonathan Brown, The Caravan Club, Edinburgh, Talbot Rice Gallery, 2002 Duncan MacMillan, Scottish Art 1460 – 2000, London, Thames & Hudson, 2000 Duncan MacMillan, The Paintings of Steven Campbell, Edinburgh & London, Mainstream Publishing, 1993 Stuart Morgan and Euan McArthur, On Form and Fiction, Glasgow, Third Eye, 1990 Tony Godfrey, Steven Campbell, Marlborough, London, 1987 Steven Campbell, Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 1985
Aberdeen Art Gallery Arizona: Phoenix Art Museum Atlanta: High Museum of Art Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Scottish National Portrait Gallery Glasgow: Airport International Departures Lodge Art Gallery and Museum Leeds: City Art Gallery Liverpool: Tate Gallery London: Arts Council of Great Britain British Council Contemporary Art Society Prudential Corporation Tate Gallery Mexico City: Tamayo Museum Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre New York: Chase Manhattan Bank Dannheisser Foundation Metropolitan Museum of Art Oslo: Astrup Museum of Modern Art Southampton Art Gallery Stirling: Smith Art Gallery Tokyo: Setagaya Art Museum Washington D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum
FILM AND COLLABORATIONS 2010 Stephen J. Sinclair, Steven Campbell: Unfinished, documentary commissioned through the Steven Campbell Trust and Cardonald College. 2002 ArtWorks Scotland, BBC Television August 18 1995 Looking at Scottish Art, Around Scotland series, BBC Television 1994 “Leeds City Gallery” with Alan Bennett, BBC Television “The Bigger Picture: A History of Scottish Art”, BBC Scotland 1990 Interview with Professor Martin Kemp, The Third Ear Programme, BBC Radio 3, 23 March 1987 Bob Clyde, Death of an Entomologist, Film for Scottish Television 1986 – 87 Bill Forsyth, Housekeeping, Film, Scenic Art by Steven Campbell 1986 Alistair Scott, Steven Campbell/ Adrian Wiszniewski, Arena, BBC Television, February 1986 George Mackay Brown, The Scottish Bestiary, Collection of Poetry, Paragon Press, illustrations by Scottish Artists including Steven Campbell 1985 Barry Yourgrau, A Man Jumps out of Airplane, Collection of Poetry and Prose, SUN, Cover Illustration by Steven Campbell Barry Yourgrau, Reading: I Keep my Father in a Bottle, Performing Garage Scenic Art by Steven Campbell
Marlborough
LONDON
NEW YORK
Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44 (0)20 7629 5161 Telefax: +44 (0)20 7629 6338 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com
Marlborough Gallery Inc. 40 West 57th Street New York, N.Y. 10019 Telephone: +1 212 541 4900 Telefax: +1 212 541 4948 mny@marlboroughgallery.com www.marlboroughgallery.com
Marlborough Contemporary 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44 (0)20 7629 5161 Telefax: +44 (0)20 7629 6338 info@marlboroughcontemporary.com www.marlboroughcontemporary.com
Marlborough Contemporary 545 West 25th Street New York, N.Y. 10001 Telephone: +1 212 463 8634 Telefax: +1 212 463 9658 info@marlboroughcontemporary.com www.marlboroughcontemporary.com
MADRID
BARCELONA
GalerĂa Marlborough SA Orfila 5 28010 Madrid Telephone: +34 91 319 1414 Telefax: +34 91 308 4345 info@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com
Marlborough Barcelona Enric Granados, 68 08008 Barcelona. Telephone: +34 93 467 4454 Telefax: +34 93 467 4451 infobarcelona@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com
Photography: Prudence Cuming Associates, Richard Ivey Design: Stocks Taylor Benson Print: Impress Print Services ISBN 978-1-909707-42-9 Catalogue No. 770 Š 2017 Marlborough
THE ART OF
Steven Campbell