Overview
Flowers Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works on paper by Glen Baxter.
Known for his absurdist drawings and surreal visual non sequiturs, Baxter creates a world in which cowboys contemplate modern art, schoolboys grapple with philosophy and Vikings ponder a mysterious substance named tofu.
Baxter's captioned drawings, rendered in ink and crayon, subvert the visual style of adventure comic series such as Biggles and Dan Dare by the inclusion of unconventional narrative twists.
Whilst I was checking out the Rothkos Old Blaze was concentrating on the smaller Braques (2014) provides a characteristic survey of art appreciation, by a cowboy wandering improbabably through an art gallery on horseback. While he muses the paintings on the walls, his horse Old Blaze munches thoughtfully on a framed canvas.
Lampooning the signifiers of taste such as fine dining and connoisseurship, and misplacing icons of high culture such as the paintings of Mondrian and Rothko within pop-genres from the Wild West to Boy's Own, Baxter's work raises questions around the social structures underpinning aesthetic values.
According to Michael Wilson (Artforum, October 2005), Baxter "...achieves a kind of social-surrealist comedy comparable to the achievements of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Vic Reeves."
