Glen Baxter
Face to Face, Bernard Blistène, 2026
Semiose éditions
(English edition)
The fourth title in the “Face to Face” series and a renewed collaboration between Glen Baxter and Semiose, following on from his “Color Me” in 2018, this conversation offers, in his own words, a fresh insight into the artist and his work, further enhanced by the eloquence of the astute and distinguished Bernard Blistène. This interview provides an opportunity to situate Glen Baxter's work within its historical context, where humour is combined with a genuine social and anthropological critique of contemporary art. Glen Baxter has often been perceived as existing on the margins of innocuous illustration, yet on the contrary, he fully shared the corrosive subversion that was characteristic of the artists who emerged in the wake of Pop Art, appropriating popular culture to deliver a scathing critique.
“Sometimes an image comes first. Sometimes it's the words. Sometimes I want to find a way to include a certain word—for instance the word clandestine which I used in my drawing of cowboys discussing Jane Austen. Sometimes I become fixated with certain words: tofu being an example. Finding these specific words is like dropping a bomb into an otherwise mundane sentence!” Glen Baxter
Glen Baxter
Glen Baxter’s œuvre is immediately recognisable. He has remained true to his simple and highly effective process for almost fifty years: a comic sketch is accompanied by a short, incongruous, even discordant caption. Baxter elaborates a parallel world based on a burlesque hijacking of an iconography sourced from the 1930s and 40s, which provides him with an assortment of cowboys, boy scouts and golfers in tweed. His refined prose contrasts with his seemingly outdated imagery, blending elegantly in a quest for the frisson cherished by surrealists such as de Chirico and Max Ernst. Bewilderingly nonsensical, astonishingly witty and tragi-comic, like life itself, these talkative drawings celebrate the heady rush of linguistic mishaps.
Born in 1944, in Leeds, Yorkshire, Glen Baxter attended the Leeds School of Art. After several stays in New York in the 1970s, where he was introduced to poetry through his involvement with the artistic circles of St. Mark’s Church, he finally settled in the Grosvenor Park area of South London. He taught at Goldsmiths College for around fifteen years. His work has been regularly exhibited in New York, London, Tokyo and Sidney as well as in France, where it has been shown in numerous institutions and features in around fifteen public collections including the Pompidou Centre, the National Centre for the Visual Arts (CNAP) and several Regional Contemporary Art Collections (FRACs). His oeuvres are also included in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the MoMA in New York. His drawings have regularly graced the pages of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Observer and Le Monde. He has also published some fifty books.