Of the so-called New Glasgow Boys - Peter Howson, Ken Currie, Adrian Wiszniewski, and Steven Campbell - it was Campbell who achieved the swiftest and most striking success.
Born in Glasgow, he originally worked as a maintenance engineer in a steelworks in Cambuslang before attending Glasgow School of Art in his thirties. Upon graduating in 1982, he rapidly established himself as one of the leading Scottish figurative painters of his generation, his work helping to reassert Glasgow’s position on the international art map during the 1980s.
Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at the end of his studies, Campbell travelled to New York to continue his training at the Pratt Institute. Working from a studio in Brooklyn between 1982 and 1986, he experienced a key period in his artistic development and achieved early critical acclaim. His first solo exhibition at the prestigious Barbara Toll Gallery in 1983 introduced his work to American audiences, and his participation in several high-profile group shows quickly cemented his international reputation. This period was also instrumental in raising global awareness of contemporary Scottish art.
On his return to the UK, Campbell secured long-term representation with Marlborough Fine Art in London, which continued to champion his work throughout his career. His paintings My Parents Were Born from the Tracks and No Room on the Bed are representative of an artist in full command of his vision. Created around 1990, they coincide with the major exhibition On Form and Fiction (1989 - 1990) at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre (now the CCA). An immersive, wall-to-wall installation of interconnected works, the show became the most well-attended exhibition in the venue’s history, attracting some 30,000 visitors in only a few weeks.
As demonstrated so powerfully by On Form and Fiction, Campbell’s early interest in installation and performance, in art as an immersive, theatrical experience, continued to shape his painting practice. His large-scale canvases often evoke the atmosphere of stage sets, filled with complex spatial constructions and recurring motifs. Even in more intimate works, he transported viewers into mysterious interior worlds: surreal dreamscapes rich in literary, psychological, and symbolic reference.
Campbell’s art drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, from P. G. Wodehouse and detective fiction to children’s book illustrations. These influences contributed both to the humour and unease in his compositions and to his use of a vivid, saturated palette that intensified after his U.S. period. His paintings are populated by a recurring cast of enigmatic figures, often versions of himself, which he likened to a troupe of actors in an ongoing narrative. “I am the director, writer and producer,” he once said, describing his own approach to these otherworldly dramas.
Campbell frequently painted under artificial light, heightening the uncanny, dreamlike atmosphere of his scenes. In No Room on the Bed, for instance, he conjures a moment of suspended time: an open book lies across the sheets, while a meticulously rendered still life recalls an Old Master tableau. Through a window, a moonlit landscape of the Campsie Hills, where Campbell lived, gently emerges, enveloped by the silhouette of an overhanging tree. The result is a world that hovers between waking and dreaming, filled with wit, tension, and painterly brilliance.
Campbell’s untimely death in 2007, at the age of 54 from a ruptured appendix, robbed the art world of a singular and powerful voice in contemporary figurative painting. Completely distinctive, both of and apart from the painterly traditions he drew upon, his work continues to resonate.
