Glen Baxter

GLEN BAXTER (1944-2026)

"Mr. Baxter betrays all the ominous symptoms of genius."  Edward Gorey

Born in Leeds, Baxter studied at Leeds College of Art before moving to London, where he taught at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the late 1960s and Goldsmiths from 1974 to 1986.  Baxter first read his own poetry in 1974 at St. Mark’s Church, New York, before developing his distinctive drawing style, which combines imagery and text in the format of a single cell graphic panel. Presenting a precise, gently absurd tension between language and image, his acclaimed practice was informed through his own early struggles with speech.

For those who have the misfortune to stammer, certain words and letters can induce dread. Strategies are developed and this is how I began to circumvent the everyday trauma of trying to achieve fluency of speech. Each element of language has to be rearranged. At times resulting in unusual sentence formations.

This was the world I took with me to art school, where I discovered that this fitted in perfectly with André Breton's description of Surrealism. I was happy to discover I was not alone, and this newfound freedom allowed me to explore the combinations of words and images that were to become the bedrock of what we now know as a Glen Baxter drawing. - Glen Baxter

Deriving material from varied sources such as pulp fiction, adventure stories, cowboys, objects and foodstuffs with names that he found intriguing, Baxter worked with a number of recurring personas who contemplate life's big and small questions in incongruous scenarios at once familiar and surreal, including the great outdoors, art galleries, and the dinner table.

London-based Glen Baxter was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and exhibited internationally, with his work in the collections of Tate and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Sell-out publications of his work include ‘New Ways with Vegetables and Other Disasters’ (2021).

"a kind of mad cross between Magritte, S. J. Perelman and Pulp Fiction" Mel Gussons, New York Times

“...achieves a kind of social-surrealist comedy comparable to the achievements of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Vic Reeves” Michael Wilson, ArtForum