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last picture show with Steven Campbell
When Steven Campbell died last August, at the age of just 54, he was an artist still in the prime of his career.
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As one of the 'young Glasgow boys' who breathed fire into the city's art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, along with contemporaries such as Adrian Wiszniewski,
Campb
ell wrestled with the dark and the violent in his paintings: the first attention he drew from those outside his art school circle was with a performance piece, Poised Murder, which centred on the turbulent life of the teenage French murderer Violette Nozière.
http://www.collection-privee.org/public/galerie-photo-noziere.php?titre=Violette%20Noziere
Steven Campbell
She's here, in the art school, in one of Campbell's paintings that formed part of the work: tall and willowy, shrouded in dark browns and watery greys: a ghost, or an avenging angel, perhaps.
Campbell ties her life - obedient teenage daughter, seductress and murderer - to more modern analogues in a series of paintings that, bursting with queasy colour, hook her up with characters Catherine Deneuve played in two iconic films on sexual deviance: Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Luis Buñuel's Belle De Jour.
This series is just the beginning of a dizzying trip through identity and myth in the art school: Campbell's rich, almost florid style allows for no flat panels of colour: blood and skulls and dismembered torsos and bones are hidden in chair legs, in patterned carpets, in the clothes of protagonists who often take after the artist. (Indeed, as with Van Gogh, the chair sometimes seems to stand in for the artist.)
Read more:
http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/284771-the-last-picture-show-with-steven-campbell
Steven Campbell