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.”
Extracts:
“In the 1960s, there was a famous bookshop in Charing Cross Road. They had a lot of little American magazines, avant-garde poetry and New York poetry. And they had a kind of energy that I really liked. I just found the enthusiasm was great. And so, I began reading a lot of that. There were two American poets called Ron Padgett and Larry Fagin. Larry had a little magazine called Adventures in Poetry, a small stapled-together booklet, distributed to a few bookshops here and there. We got in touch and I sent him a couple of my little prose poems. And he liked them and published them in the United States, in his little magazine. Nothing special, you know. Then in 1974, they invited me to go to New York to read my poetry. I couldn’t believe it because I’d had zero response over here. I’d never met anybody who had a similar interest. So anyway, I went to New York, to St. Mark’s Church. I’d never spoken in public before. I’d never read anything out loud. So, there I was going to be standing up reading my poetry in this famous church, this artistic hub where people like William S. Burroughs had been, Merce Cunningham, etc. It was incredible. And I was going to be in there speaking to all these Americans. I was petrified!”
“I was writing these prose poems. I’d always been intrigued by the collage novels of Max Ernst. I was fascinated by the aspect of the dislocation that occurs. I wanted to do something similar, but I realised that it wasn’t a good idea to follow in his footsteps and use Victorian steel engravings to produce work. I was trying to find source material on flea markets or in junk shops, that I could transform. And that’s when I found these old boys’ books. They had all these pictures in them. And I thought to myself, nobody has ever used these in art. That was good, because it was like virgin territory. And so, I began to collect these books and then somehow my poetry began to collide with these drawings and I created little captions underneath, which were completely unrelated to what was going on in the pictures. What I always thought was great was this frisson [thrill / tingle] when you see something and then you read something and it doesn’t make sense. Your brain immediately tries to make a logical connection and there’s a kind of explosion, the humour makes your brain explode. And that’s what I love!”
“Funnily enough, because of Instagram, I dug out drawings I did forty years ago and I put them up and people went, ‘Oh, it’s a brand-new Glen Baxter.’ No, I did it forty years ago but it’s still funny. It hasn’t dated in the way that most political cartooning dates— apart from one or two very famous ones—and where you have to explain everything: they’ve completely lost their impact. So, to be outdated and be out of step. Yes, that’s correct. To be an outsider. Yes, absolutely. I love all that. To be slightly eccentric. Yes, correct again. In the way that Raymond Roussel was eccentric enough to be accepted by the Surrealists, but he thought they were crazy. He couldn’t connect with them because he was outside, in his own crazy world.”