Clive Barker

In the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a pair of golden boots sits in quiet defiance of everything conventional sculpture was supposed to be. Cast in chrome plated steel and polished to a blinding sheen, they belong to Clive Barker, a British artist who spent the better part of four decades transforming the mundane into the monumental. Though Barker passed away in 2015, interest in his work has continued to grow steadily, with institutions and private collectors alike reappraising a practice that was always too singular to be contained by any single movement. Clive Barker was born in Luton, England, in 1932, and his early years were shaped by the particular texture of postwar British life.

Clive Barker

14th February 1929

He trained at the Luton College of Technology and Art before relocating to London, where the city's energy in the late 1950s and early 1960s proved to be an electrifying influence. London at that moment was a place where American popular culture collided with British working class sensibility, where advertising imagery and consumer goods were beginning to take on the weight of mythology. Barker absorbed all of it with a sharp and affectionate eye. His artistic development placed him in close proximity to the British Pop Art movement, though he was never quite of it in the way that Richard Hamilton or Peter Blake were.

Where those artists worked primarily on canvas and in print, Barker was drawn irresistibly to objects. He became a sculptor of everyday things, chrome plating, casting in bronze, and working in steel to transform paint brushes, Coca Cola bottles, zips, and toy pistols into gleaming artifacts that felt simultaneously familiar and utterly strange. His process involved a kind of loving elevation, taking the overlooked stuff of daily existence and granting it the permanence and gravity of classical sculpture. Among his most celebrated works is the series of chrome plated paint brushes and palettes that he produced in the late 1960s, works that played knowingly with the idea of the artist's tool as subject.

There is something both comic and deeply sincere in this gesture, a sculptor rendering the painter's implement immortal in polished metal. His pieces from this period were shown at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, a space that was one of the great crucibles of British Pop and which counted Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones among its circle of admirers. Fraser's gallery was a place where art and rock culture shared the same glamorous oxygen, and Barker fitted that world with an easy, unshowy confidence. The work represented on The Collection, titled "14th February 1929," is a particularly eloquent example of what made Barker so compelling as an artist.

An aluminium replica Tommy gun contained within a blue velvet lined instrument case, it carries the date of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, the infamous Chicago gangland killing that lodged itself permanently in the popular imagination. The piece is exquisitely made, the velvet lining suggesting a jeweller's presentation box or a musical instrument's case, lending an almost tender, ceremonial quality to an object of violence. Barker consistently found this kind of tonal complexity, using beauty as a lens through which danger, desire, and history could be examined without flinching. From a collecting perspective, Barker's work occupies a genuinely distinctive position.

He is not as widely traded at auction as contemporaries such as Allen Jones or Patrick Caulfield, which means there is still meaningful opportunity for collectors who recognise his importance. His sculptures reward close attention in person, since photographs rarely capture the full physical presence of the polished surfaces, the weight of the metal, or the precision of the fabrication. Works from his peak period in the 1960s and 1970s are the most sought after, but his practice remained consistent and inventive across his career, and later works are often undervalued relative to their quality. To understand Barker properly it helps to think about him alongside artists on both sides of the Atlantic who were similarly interrogating consumer culture through three dimensional form.

Jasper Johns's bronze ale cans are a useful point of comparison, as are the works of Tom Wesselmann and Mel Ramos, though Barker's British sensibility always gave his work a slightly cooler, more ironic register than the American counterparts. Within Britain, he shares a sensibility with Eduardo Paolozzi, who also looked to popular imagery and industrial materials for his raw material, and with the sculptor Clive Wilkins, whose work similarly occupies the space between craft and concept. What makes Barker matter today is not simply the historical significance of his contribution to British sculpture, though that contribution is substantial. It is the quality of genuine feeling in the work, the sense that beneath the gleaming surfaces there is a real tenderness for the objects and images of ordinary life.

In an era when much art announces its seriousness through difficulty and obscurity, Barker's sculptures are disarmingly pleasurable to encounter. They invite you in rather than holding you at a distance. That generosity of spirit, combined with a technical exactitude that borders on the obsessive, produces objects that remain as compelling now as when they were first made. For collectors willing to look carefully, the work of Clive Barker represents both a significant piece of art history and an ongoing source of aesthetic delight.