Artists

Glen Baxter

Press release

This first exhibition of Glen Baxter at Semiose gallery stands as a tribute to the artist, who sadly passed away on March 29, 2026 in London. Glen Baxter was able to prepare this longstanding project with Semiose, marking the beginning of a new artistic collaboration. The exhibition presents a selection of works on paper, which also appear in the recently published book by Semiose for the 'Face to face' series. Indeed, a number of weeks before his passing, Glen Baxter was interviewed at length by the curator and museum director Bernard Blistène. During this conversation, the artist enthusiastically and amusingly recounted his early involvement with the artistic coterie who frequented St Mark's Church in New York, his admiration for certain genres of cinema, the theatre of the absurd and his own experiments with the blurring of the boundaries between text and image. Instantly recognizable, delightfully nonsensical and replete with witticisms, his voluble drawings celebrate the vertiginous whirl of linguistic mishaps. With a wonderfully elegant touch, they combine refined prose with popular images from a bygone era, thus producing a wonderfully discordant effect. Bernard Blistène offers the following assessment: "I also like the idea that there is nothing to 'decode' in your work and that very rapidly, it becomes a bit reductive for the viewer, when they try to explain it. The strength of what you propose undoubtedly lies in the tension it creates. That's probably why I don't see any 'hidden meaning' in your work, but rather something that feels like a singular experience, where the meaning produced doesn't amount to a clearcut explanation. And I love that!" This interview fully reveals the historical connotations in his work and exposes his social and anthropological critique of contemporary art, which he cloaks with apparent humour. Glen Baxter has often been perceived as existing on the margins of innocuous illustration, yet on the contrary, he fully shared the corrosive subversion that was characteristic of the artists who emerged in the wake of Pop Art, appropriating popular culture to deliver a scathing critique. As Bernard Blistène states, Glen Baxter cultivated a highly distinctive stance: "However, it is difficult to place Glen Baxter anywhere other than in the realm of contemporary art, where he often seems to be an ironic chronicler, playing on the discrepancies in the world that he observes through his own characters. I like the fact that—without imposing any kind of answers—you expose the gap without filling it, that you leave it open to the world, so to speak."