steven campbell
5th August - 27th September

Steven Campbell, the son of a steelworker and a steelworker himself before attending Glasgow School of Art, exploded onto the Scottish art scene in 1982 in the Scottish Arts Council exhibition ‘Scottish Art Now’. He soon became the driving force behind the group of painters (including Howson) known as the new ‘Glasgow Boys’, whose large-scale, figurative paintings marked a renaissance in painting and Glasgow in particular as a cultural centre. By the mid-1980s, Campbell’s international reputation was established with his move to New York.

Campbell’s paintings are stylistically and metaphorically complex, combining an eclectic range of personal and literary sources, and an understanding of the inherited language of painting. His alter-ego, the tweed-clad ‘Lost Hiker’, finds himself in a world where everything is topsy-turvy, full of broken signs and references to past artists, literature, history and myth.

After a subdued presence in the art world for nine years, Campbell returned with ‘The Caravan Club’ at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh in 2002. These beautiful yet savage paintings reflected tragedies in Campbell’s own life as well as exposing the fragility of the everyday world. In 2004, Campbell launched his first major show in Glasgow since his groundbreaking exhibition at the Third Eye Centre in 1990. Entitled ‘Jean-Pierre Léaud’, after the film actor, this body of work combines references as diverse as Rosslyn Chapel’s Prentice Pillar, Cézanne, The Green Man, Bela Lugosi, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Less dark than previous work, the themes of ‘apprentice and master’ and ‘the actor’ are expressed in complex compositions with surreal humour and in a glorious patchwork of colour and detail.

The Glasgow Herald has acclaimed Campbell as ‘the finest Scottish painter of his generation’, and these recent paintings as ‘stronger, more analytical than they have been in a long time’.