New Glasgow Boys
- Comments
-
Glasgow Museums has a collection of over 300 works by the New Glasgow Boys which date from between 1983 and 1997.
This collection includes approximately 42 paintings, 140 drawings and 144 prints by Steven Campbell, Ken Currie, Peter Howson and Adrian Wiszniewski, known collectively as the 'New Glasgow Boys'. Howson and Currie often choose to represent aspects of social history in Scotland, while Campbell and Wiszniewski show more interest in concepts and literary influences, having started in the Environmental Art Department at The Glasgow School of Art before moving to the Painting Department.
The New Glasgow Boys studied at The Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s and achieved national and international success for renewing interest in painting the human figure at a time when American Abstraction, Pop and conceptual art dominated Western art. The success of this group led to them being a key part of Glasgow's cultural renaissance including the City of Culture in 1990 and a significant body of work from all four artists was collected and shown in the Gallery of Modern Art when it opened in 1996.
More recently Steven Campbell’s On Form and Fiction (1989) - a large installation of nine framed paintings, over 100 drawings, with found objects and sound - was acquired jointly with National Galleries of Scotland following its inclusion in the 2014 GENERATION project. GENERATION was a major Scottish artists survey show across the country as part of the cultural programme for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow with the inclusion of this work by Campbell acknowledging its influence on younger generations of artists in the country.
- Broader term