“….Wretched Stars, Insatiable Heaven….”  New Work 2006-2007

The Directors of Marlborough Fine Art are delighted to announce their forthcoming Memorial Exhibition of paintings by Steven Campbell.  Shortly before his untimely death in August 2007, Steven chose this title for his planned exhibition at the Glasgow Print studio and the Glasgow School of Art in 2008.  It is a quotation from Monteverdi’s Orfeo – one of the first ‘Modern’ Operas.

The Glasgow Print Studio and the Glasgow School of Art honoured this commitment by showing a selection of pictures from this final body of work in 2008.  This will be the first time they have been seen in their entirety.   The paintings stand as a fitting memorial to the Scottish artist who is acknowledged as the most important and original of his generation.

In these paintings, all completed in the last year of his life, Campbell returns triumphantly to his dramatic, complex and thoughtful style of the 1980’s.  As he did then, so now he creates a new cast of characters frozen in action leaving us to piece together the sequence of events.   A primary motif of these paintings is his brightly coloured, paisley patterns merging with abstract designs and motifs borrowed from art history, literature and Steven’s personal symbolism used to create strange surreal and unsettling narratives.

Campbell studied at the Glasgow School of Art between 1978-82 along with other members of the ‘New Glasgow Boys’ such as Peter Howson, Ken Currie and Adrian Wisniewski. After graduating, Campbell won the prestigious Fulbright scholarship and spent four years in New York. It was whilst working there that his international reputation was established after much critical acclaim.

His work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in the collections of The Arts Council of Great Britain, The British Council, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York.