Glen Baxter: Unhinged in Hunslett
is at Leeds Arts University in their Vernon Street Gallery, until 11 April 2019
From
Flowers Gallery website:
Glen
Baxter was born in Leeds in 1944 and studied at Leeds College of Art from
1960-5. He has exhibited internationally and his work is in
the collections of the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London. The artist has published numerous books, including Almost Completely Baxter, New and
Selected Blurtings in 2016 and Ominous Stains in 2009, and has also
appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Elle,
and Vogue.
It
was at art school, through the work of Andr̩é Breton, that Baxter first
discovered Surrealism, his passion in life. His captioned drawings,
rendered in ink and crayon, subvert the visual style of adventure
comic series such as Biggles and Dan Dare by the inclusion of unconventional narrative twists.
The
artist stages contrived scenes in environments such as art galleries,
auction houses and the great outdoors with humorous results. Lampooning
the signifiers of taste such as fine dining and connoisseurship,
and misplacing icons of high culture such as the paintings of
Mondrian and Rothko, Baxter’s work raises questions around the social
structures underpinning aesthetic values.
NB
the pictures, below, are not necessarily included in the current exhibition but
are some of my personal favourites -
