Christopher Bucklow

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The Mirror and the Lamp, 2008 by Bucklow The Mirror and the Lamp, 2008.jpg
The Mirror and the Lamp, 2008 by Bucklow

Christopher Bucklow (born 1957) is a British artist and art-historian. [1] His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in numerous public collections including the Guggenheim Museum, [2] Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), [3] Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (SFMoMA), [4] and The Metropolitan Museum of Art [5] among others. He has received residencies at The British Museum, London, the Banff Center for the Arts, Alberta, and The Centre for Studies in British Romanticism, Grasmere. [6] Bucklow is best known for his ongoing photographic series Guests (1993–present) [7] and his improvisational paintings from the series To Reach Inside A Vault (2006–present). [8] He is the author of numerous books and essays including The Sea of Time and Space (Wordsworth Trust, 2004), [9] "This is Personal: Blake and Mental Fight" in Blake & Sons, Lifestyles and Mysticism in Contemporary Art (University College, Cork, 2005), What is in the Dwat: The Universe of Guston's Final Decade (Wordsworth Trust, 2007), [10] and the co-author of Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology (Thames & Hudson, 2019). [11]

Contents

Life and work

Bucklow was born in Flixton, Greater Manchester, England. He graduated with a degree in art history in 1978. Between 1978 and 1995 he worked as a curator in the Prints & Drawings Department at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London [12] where he researched Romanticism, photography, and developed an interest in the work of William Blake (British, 1757 – 1827). [13] An account of Bucklow's career as a curator and the forces that propelled his transition to art praxis can be found in "Rhetoric and Motive in the Writing of Art History: A Shapeshifter's Perspective" in Remaking Art History (Routledge, New York City; 2007). [14]

Bucklow's early work (1989–91) was conceptual and sculptural, often taking the form of plant species that he altered genetically or grafted together. [15] In the 1990s he created two bodies of  photographic work, The Beauty of the World (1991) and Guest - also known as Tetrarchs, that were foundational for Britain's contemporary negative-less photography movement [16] .

Guests was created using a 30 x 40-inch pinhole camera, built by Bucklow, with thousands of apertures to make unique cibachrome chromogenic prints. [17] Tetrarchs were created using either a 40 x 60-inch camera, or one with a 40 x 100 inches plate size. [18] Guest (1993–present) features silhouettes of persons that appear to the artist in dreams. Friends, family, and fellow artists like Matthew Barney and Adam Fuss [19] are featured individually in the work as a collective of figures drawn by the multiple solar images directed through the 25,000 apertures in Bucklow's camera. [20] [21]

His interest in personal mythology, Jungian dream psychology, metaphor and the use of personification was continued in his subsequent paintings. [22] To Reach Inside A Vault is a series of large scale improvisational paintings in which a commedia dell'arte technique is used to generate the subjects or plot. [23] These paintings were exhibited in Bucklow's 2017 retrospective Said Now, For All Time at the Southampton City Art Gallery, UK. [24]

Public collections

Museum of Modern Art, New York [25]

Metropolitan Museum of Art [26]

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum [27]

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston [28]

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth [29]

Dallas Museum of Art [30]

Victoria & Albert Museum [31]

The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere

Honolulu Museum of Art

Herzliya Museum of Art [32]

High Museum of Art [33]

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [34]

Blanton Museum of Art, [35]

Cleveland Museum of Art [36]

Yale Center for British Art

Norton Museum, Palm Beach [37]

Perez Art Museum Miami [38]

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [39]

Los Angeles County Museum of Art [40]

Publications

Monographs

Related Research Articles

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