Steve Cox | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Steven Martin Cox 1958 (age 64–65) |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Education | Victorian College of the Arts |
| Known for | Predominantly watercolour, gouache, ink, collage on paper. |
Steven Martin Cox (born 1958) is an English Australian artist and writer, known for his homoerotic images; stream of consciousness landscapes and animal/human hybrids. He writes art-related and queer-related articles and reviews for various publications.
Cox was born in Harringay, London, England and arrived in Melbourne, Australia in 1968, when his family emigrated. He studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts from 1978 to 1980, where one of his main lecturers was Gareth Sansom. In 1983 he was awarded the Keith & Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship and subsequently spent eighteen months making work in London and Cairo. Also in 1983, he was included in the important survey of Australian art, Perspecta, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. [1] In 1989 he was awarded an Australia Council grant to spend three months making work at the Villa Ghedini, in Besozzo, Northern Italy. In 1997, Cox completed a Masters in Fine Art at Deakin University; his thesis, which was in two parts: the first centred around the notion of a causal link between the creative act of the artist and the destructive act of the serial murderer; the second researched the life, work and death of British playwright Joe Orton.
Cox has written numerous essays and articles on the suppression of homo-eroticism in western art since the Renaissance, and the ways in which artists have managed to circumvent this censure. [2]
His early work dealt with the aberrant psychology of murderers and their victims. In 1987 he staged an exhibition of paintings, 'Beyond Belief', which documented the crimes of the 1960s British Moors murderers. The show was largely based upon the 1967 book by Emlyn Williams, Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection. Over the years, the artist has obsessively collected more than a dozen copies of the book, in both hardback and paperback versions. Cox has also exhibited paintings of the serial killers Dennis Nilsen, Peter Manuel, and Peter Kurten amongst others - the latter work being acquired for the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
In 1995, his exhibition Kinderspiel (Child’s Play) dealt exclusively with the subject of children who kill other children. [3] [4] His 1996 Masters Thesis (Deakin University), titled ‘Murder and Art: the Causal Links’, drew parallels between the creative mind of the artist and the murderous mind of the serial killer.
Cox has explored the phenomena of dance culture, a subject that has spawned five exhibitions of portraits of clubbers, party-drug takers and bouncers, most notably in Rave: Club Culture (2000), Ecstasy: a celebration (2000) [5] and Confessions of a Raving Lunatic (2002).
As an out gay artist, Cox has often featured homoeroticism within his work. His exhibition Testosterone Zone (1996) dealt with, amongst other things, frank male nudity and the still-existing taboo over public representations of male genitalia. To this end, he has always been outspoken against censorship in the arts, as seen in an interview in issue 11 of Artist Profile magazine (2010). [6] and Cox's article, commissioned by The Guardian,. [7]
For decades, Cox's imagery has often been surreal, using unsettling juxtapositions of symbols. In The New Agrarian (1991), a partially nude boxer spars alone in front of a blackboard in an otherwise empty field. In Jelly Kitten (2005) a cartoon cat's head is simultaneously a portrait of a cute children's cartoon character and a tormented mind, perhaps reminiscent of Sidney Nolan's Gallipoli series, which featured portraits of returned soldiers.
In 2016, Cox was commissioned to paint a massive mural on the wall of the restaurant, Grub Food Van, in Fitzroy, Melbourne. He based this major work on Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, in the National Gallery, London.
Since 1982 he has staged over thirty-five one-person exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and has participated in over fifty group-exhibitions, including Moist: Australian Watercolours, (2005) at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, [8] and This and Other Worlds, (2005) at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. [9] In 2008 he was included in True Crime: Murder and Misdemeanour in Australian Art, at the Geelong Art Gallery. [10]
George Frederick Henry Bell was an Australian painter and teacher, critic, portraitist, violinist and war artist who contributed significantly to the advancement of the local Modern movement from the 1920s to the 1930s.
Rick Amor is an Australian artist and figurative painter. He was an Official War Artist for Australia.
Nicholas Harding was a British-born Australian artist, known for his paintings, in particular portraits.
Louise Hearman is an artist from Melbourne who has been painting and drawing from a very young age. At high school level she attended Tintern Church of England Girls Grammar School in Ringwood in East Victoria where she showed much ability in her art classes. She attended Victorian College of the Arts from 1982–1984. She mostly paints with oil on masonite, though she does work with pastel and charcoal from time to time.
Walter Herbert Withers was an English-born Australian landscape artist and a member of the Heidelberg School of Australian impressionists.
Nicholas Chevalier was a Russian-born artist who worked in Australia and New Zealand.
Albert Henry Fullwood was an Australian artist who made a significant contribution to art in Australia. He painted with Heidelberg School artists around Melbourne and moved with Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton to live and paint at their camp in Sirius Cove, Sydney. Fullwood was the Australian official war artist to the 5th Division in the World War I.
Mike Parr is an Australian performance artist and printmaker. Parr's works have been exhibited in Australia and internationally, including in Brazil, Cuba, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States.
Bob Jenyns is a prolific Australian artist whose practice, spanning over four decades, has produced countless sculptures, prints, drawings, and paintings. He has participated in many of Australia's most significant art exhibitions including the first Biennale of Sydney (1973), the 1973, 1975 and 1978 Mildura Sculpture Triennials, the 1981 Australian Perspecta, the 2nd Australian Sculpture Biennale, and the 1990 Sculpture Triennial. Jenyns was a finalist in the 2006 Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, and in 2007 won the award with his work Pont de l'archeveche. He is represented in many of the country's largest collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Jenyns has also received multiple grants from the Australia Council's Visual Arts Board, has curated exhibitions and has taught at the Tasmanian School of Art as head of the sculpture department (1982–2005).
Gareth Sansom is an Australian artist, painter, printmaker and collagist and winner of the 2008 John McCaughey Memorial Prize of $100,000.
Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack was a German-born Australian artist.
Eric Prentice Anchor Thake was an Australian artist, designer, painter, printmaker and war artist.
Robert Hague, is an Australian artist living and working in Melbourne, Victoria. He is best known for his metal and marble sculpture and his detailed lithographic print work.
Nigel Cox is an Irish figurative artist.
Jeffrey Thomas Makin is an Australian artist, art critic, and director of Port Jackson Press Australia. He is best known for his paintings en plein air of the Australian landscape.
Chris Mason is an Australian artist. Mason resides in Melbourne. His work is held in several public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Australia and the State Library of Victoria.
Mary McCartney Macqueen was an Australian artist who was known for her drawing, printmaking and mixed media works on paper. Her artistic style was expressive, gestural and experimental.
Mark Titmarsh is a contemporary Australian painter. His work involves permutations of painting, sculpture, installation, screen media, performance and writing. In 2017, he published a book called Expanded Painting.
Stephen Wickham is an Australian photographer, painter and printmaker.
Malcolm Ian Howie (1900-1936) was a self-taught commercial and botanical watercolour artist and Methodist local preacher.
