Biography
Steven Campbell emerged as the leading figure of a group of Scottish figurative painters who began to exhibit their work in the early 1980s. After working as an engineer for seven years, in 1982 Campbell graduated from Glasgow School of Art. A Fulbright Scholarship took him to New York, where he became commercially very successful. In 1986 Campbell returned to Glasgow and continued to develop his distinctive painting style, which often has a surreal and mysterious quality. His last major exhibition was 'The Caravan Club' in 2002, at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. He died on 15 August 2007.
Glossary terms
Environmental art
Environmental art is a broad term encapsulating art that creates an immersive ‘environment’, often made for an urban or rural space, as opposed to a traditional gallery. The term was popularised in the late 1960s by artists pushing the boundaries of sculpture and is often closely linked with Land Art. The scope of environmental art is very broad and can be fragile and ephemeral, solid and permanent, large or small scale.
Installation art
An art practice developed in the second half of the twentieth century that broke away from the view of a sculpture as a singular object to be looked at. Instead, installation artists create an environment that may surround the viewer. Many are temporary or created for a particular location.
Postmodernism
Late twentieth century art that includes a great variety of styles, so is hard to define but is often characterised as a reaction against the formalism perceived to dominate Modernism. In architecture, it describes a style which borrows from many different traditions and which contrasts with the clarity and simplicity of many modernist buildings.
