We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Glen Baxter on 29 March 2026, in London, surrounded by his loved ones. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
In recent weeks, when his illness allowed, Glen Baxter was able to prepare the exhibition scheduled for May at Semiose (Paris), marking the beginning of a new collaboration with the gallery. He also sat down for a long conversation with Bernard Blistène, to be published in the Face to Face series. Until the very end, Glen Baxter retained his wit and mischievous spirit.
The exhibition will run from 23 May to 20 June 2026 at Semiose (Paris). It will offer an opportunity for those who knew him, as well as those discovering his work, to pay tribute to a wholly distinctive œuvre. Disorienting in their nonsense and sharp as flashes of wit, his loquacious drawings celebrate the vertigo of linguistic accidents, elegantly pairing refined prose with the deliberately old-fashioned character of his images.
The conversation with Bernard Blistène will be published on 23 May. In it, Glen Baxter speaks with enthusiasm and humour about his beginnings in the circles around St Mark’s Church in New York, his playful disjunctions between text and image, and his admiration for genre films and the theatre of the absurd.
So long, Colonel Baxter.
“I love this French expression, frisson. When you see something and your hair stands on end because you can’t quite make sense of it – your brain is trying to rationalize what it’s seeing and reading. And in that moment of rapture…” Glen Baxter
Born in 1944 in Leeds (Yorkshire, UK), Glen Baxter studied at the Leeds College of Art and Design. After several stays in New York in the 1970s, where he became involved in poetry circles around St. Mark’s Church, he eventually settled in London.
He taught at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1967–1974) and was a lecturer at Goldsmiths College (1974–1986).
He was first represented by Nigel Greenwood, then by the Richard Dennis Gallery and later by Flowers Gallery in London. In Paris, his work was championed by Galerie Martine et Thibault de la Châtre, followed by the Galerie Isabelle Gounod. He is currently represented by Semiose (Paris).
His work has been regularly exhibited in New York, London, San Francisco, Munich, Tokyo, Sydney and Paris, and is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the New York Public Library and MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as in numerous museums and private collections worldwide. In France alone, his work is included in around fifteen public collections (CNAP, FRAC, etc.).
His drawings have appeared in Le Monde, The Observer, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and he has published around thirty books, including The Impending Gleam (Jonathan Cape, London, 1981), The Wonder Book of Sex (Little, Brown and Company, London, 1995; trans. Wundersame Welt der Erotik, Goldmann Verlag, Munich, 1996; Le Livre de l’amour, Éditions Hoebeke, Paris, 1997), and most recently La Vie d’artiste (La Pierre d’Alun, Brussels, 2022).