Lot 206
STEVEN CAMPBELL (SCOTTISH 1953-2007) §
MUM AND DAD WERE BORN FROM THE TRACKS
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 109 to 207 | Thursday 04 December 2025 from 6pm
Description
Signed and dated 1990 verso, oil on canvas
Dimensions
94cm x 71cm (37in x 28in)
Provenance
Marlborough Fine Art Limited, London (39782.6)
Footnote
Of the ‘New Glasgow Boys’ - Peter Howson, Ken Currie, Adrian Wiszniewski and Steven Campbell - it was Campbell who achieved the swiftest success. Part of the cohort hailed for re-instating Glasgow on the international art map in the 1980s, Campbell’s scope and ambition took him further afield than his peers after graduation. With the Fulbright Scholarship awarded at the end of his studies, he travelled to New York to continue his training at the Pratt Institute. His work was quickly well-received and he went on to participate in several exhibitions in New York, including his first solo show at the prestigious Barbara Toll Gallery in 1983.
Major gallery representation continued upon Campbell’s return to the UK and it is notable that both of the works offered here were exhibited with his long-term London gallery Marlborough Fine Art.
Mum and Dad were Born from the Tracks and No Room on the Bed are representative of an artist in the full, mature flow of his career. They were created in 1990, around the time of Campbell’s extraordinarily successful exhibition On Form and Fiction, held in 1989 to 1990 at the Third Eye Centre (now CCA Gallery) in Glasgow. Comprising an immersive display of wall-to-wall works collaged together in the round, the exhibition was the most well-attended at the venue to date, attracting some 30,000 people, despite only being on display for a matter of weeks.
As demonstrated so fully by On Form and Fiction, Campbell’s early interest in installation and performance – in art as an immersive experience – continued to permeate his craft as a painter. His work was often theatrically large, akin to stage sets. The present examples are, more unusually, on a more intimate domestic scale, though nonetheless transportive.
Campbell created vignettes of a mysterious interior world; surreal dreamscapes of layered meaning and reference points, delighting in plunging his viewers down the rabbit hole. Composed of impossible, fractured planes of space, our discombobulation is tempered by frequent recurring symbols and characters, who often resemble the artist himself. A further anchor by which we can attempt to navigate his work are the points of visual humour, like the little disembodied heads of hair in My Parents were Born from the Tracks and indeed the visual play on words conjured between title and subject.
Campbell painted many of his works in spaces lit by artificial rather than natural light, the resulting effect adding to the mysterious liminality of their atmospheres. This is amply embodied in No Room on the Bed, which seems to depict a dreamer within a dream, or maybe a dreamer whose dream has seeped from its confines. Campbell, as usual, completely suspends time and space. A book lies open on the bed, a detailed still life redolent of an Old Master springs in sensual detail. On the right, a landscape of the Campsie hills (where Campbell lived) gradually emerges into our consciousness in moonlit waves, whilst an overhanging tree envelopes the scene from above.
Campbell’s tragic early death at 54 in 2007 robbed the art world of a powerful and singular voice in figurative painting. Completely distinctive - somehow both ‘of’ and completely apart from the figurative painterly tradition - he left an impressive body of work, the influence of which can be seen echoing on the walls of Scotland’s graduate degree shows to this day.
