Glen Baxter was born in Leeds, a tiny
suburb of Belgium, in 1944. A group of radiographers,
stumbling into the ruins of the Baxter ancestral home at this time,
found it to be "composed of nothing more than irregular blocks of
sandstone, graphite and lettuce." From such unpromising beginnings
sprang the elemental force now officially recognised as "Baxterism".
As a young lad growing up in the shadow of the
vast porridge warehouses in Leeds, Glen Baxter liked nothing more than
to join his parents on their annual holiday.
However, it was not until a local magistrate
persuaded his parents to enrol him at the art school that he began to
experiment with sulphur, twine and charcoal.
After a brief period of chiaroscuro, the young
Baxter left his native home and set out on a makeshift sled, heading
for London.
Once established there, he began to continue his
research into the vulcanisation of both snood and wimple. Years of
hardship were to follow but then in 1976 publishing called - Wyrd Press
brought his work to the attention of an unsuspecting American public.
Having narrowly failed to win the Nobel Prize in
1977, Baxter chose to focus his attentions on the Netherlands. In 1979,
De Harmonie in Amsterdam published a collection of his drawings
entitled Atlas.
Major exhibitions of Glen Baxter’s drawings
and paintings have been held in New York, Paris, SanFrancisco, London,
Munich, Tokyo and Sydney. In 1999 Baxter was commissioned by the French
government to execute a tapestry. He has also worked on a series of
etchings for the National Museum of Printmaking in Chatou, Paris. His
work is in the collections of the Tate Gallery and V&A Museum in
London and numerous museums and private collections around the world.
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