18 April – 8 May 2005
Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, Scotland.
Glasgow International 2005
“…people hunting for the meaning of things.” [1]
It’s twenty years since Steven Campbell helped to broker Scotland’s now firmly established place on the international map of contemporary art. Many Glasgow artists of the early 1980s expressed a hearty distaste for the traditions of Scottish expressionist and abstract art and a desire to seek an international reputation for their work as part of the global New Image tendency.Campbell’s Soup takes stock of his crucial contributions both to Scottish culture and to the international development of postmodern painting. Curated by Glasgow born Neil Mulholland (Edinburgh College of Art), this exhibition reviews that period in a wider context. In this exhibition cross-cultural and cross-generational allegories will simmer between the works of precursors Alasdair Gray, John Byrne, Ron Kitaj, Jack Knox and Alexander Moffat, paintings by Campbell contemporaries Adrian Wiszniewski, Mark Kostabi, and Alexander Guy as well as idiosyncratic works by younger artists such as Rabiya Choudhry, Ronnie Heeps, Larry Elliot, Keith Farquhar, Michael Fullerton, Rory MacBeth, Lucy McKenzie, Lee O’Connor, Alex Pollard, Harry Pye, Jo Robertson and Lucy Stein. Campbell’s Soup is a unique opportunity to experience a breadth of works spanning several generations of Scottish art. The exhibition will also feature archival and documentary materials sporting an array of Campbellesque tendencies from past and present. The accompanying catalogue features essays by Neil Mulholland, Michael Bracewell and Susannah Thompson.
[1] Steven Campbell quoted in Stuart Morgan, “Soup’s On: An Audience with Steven Campbell”, Artscribe .No.48, September/October 1984., p.31.
