I sensed that Brenda was trying to impress me….

Location

Country: Belgium
City: Brussels
Place: British Embassy, UK representation to the EU & UK delegation to NATO

A schoolgirl in uniform, with a deadpan expression, sits at her classroom desk watching her friend lifting furniture alongside the caption ‘I sensed that Brenda was trying to impress me…’. This print is typical of Glen Baxter’s humorous and absurd captioned drawings that subvert the visual style of adventure comic series such as Biggles and Dan Dare by the inclusion of unconventional narrative twists. Since discovering the work of Surrealist artist André Breton (1896–1966) at art school, Baxter has continuously employed the absurd to critique and entertain. His works often stage contrived scenes in environments such as art galleries, auction houses and the great outdoors, lampooning the signifiers of taste such as fine dining and connoisseurship, and misplacing icons of high culture, in order to raise questions around the social structures underpinning aesthetic values.

Glen Baxter was born in Leeds and studied at Leeds College of Art from 1960-5. His first exhibition was held at Gotham Book Mart Gallery, New York in 1974. He taught at the Victoria & Albert Museum from 1967 to 1974, and then at Goldsmiths College from 1974 to 1986. He has exhibited internationally and has works in the collections of the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The artist has published numerous books, including ‘Almost Completely Baxter’, ‘New and Selected Blurtings’ in 2016 and ‘Ominous Stains’ in 2009, and has also appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Elle, and Vogue.

Places

Subjects

vase (as Subject), book, map (as Subject), girl, spectacles, school, cabinet, desk, chair, table (as Subject), educational interior

Materials & Techniques

lithograph

Artist

Glen Baxter (1944 - )

Title

I sensed that Brenda was trying to impress me….

Edition

180/200

Date

1984

Medium

Lithograph

Acquisition

Purchased from Nigel Greenwood Gallery, October 1986

Inscription

below image: 180/200 / Glen Baxter '84

GAC number

16573