Clive Barker | Clive Barker [British, b.1940] | Artist Clive Barker

Birth name Clive Barker
Born 1940
Luton, Bedfordshire
Nationality British
Field Sculpture
Movement Pop art

Clive Barker is a pop artist who was born in Luton, Bedfordshire in 1940 as the second youngest of six children. He has been exhibited in numerous galleries around the world during his career and has works in permanent collections including the Tate collection and the National Portrait Gallery. He lives in Hampstead, London. He has two sons from his marriage to artist Rose Bruen, Ras and Tad.

Career
Clive was a student at Luton College of Technology and Art from 1957. However, he left the course in 1959 and went to work on the assembly-line of the Vauxhall Motors car factory in Luton, where he stayed for 18 months. in doing so he was following a number of his relatives including his father, his uncle who was a Director at Vauxhall Motors, two of his older brothers and his two brothers in law. Whilst at Vauxhall Motors Clive realised the potential of sculptural qualities of industrially finished objects, particularly in leather and chrome plated metal. Many of his works are in chrome or bronze.

As well as being an artist himself, Clive is the subject of two photographic portraits within the National Portrait Gallery collection.

Work
He made sculpture from everyday objects which he bought and had covered in chrome. Instead of taking real objects as they were he either commissioned fabricators to make replicas to his specifications or had the original objects recast or resurfaced so that the sculptures became non-functional replications of them. His early work included scultural representations of Coca Cola contour bottles, hand grenades and a Mars bar.

Clive's more recent work is predominantly in aluminium and bronze and has featured, amongst other items, a storm trooper mask, Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson, as well as a bronze depicting his own head underneath a large bunch of bananas.

He is a contemporary of Peter Blake and contributed the back sleeve cover for The Who's Face Dances album, which Peter Blake commissioned, along with one of four front sleeve pictures of Pete Townshend.

His works are in collections across the world including the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate collection and Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum.

As well as sculpture, Clive Barker has also produced a collage portrait of Peter Blake - the 'Peter Blake Box' , and a number of pastel portraits, including Pete Townshend and George Melly which were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in the 1980s.

In 2001 Peter Blake, one of the key figures in the British pop art movement, invited artists whose work he admired, including Clive Barker, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas to participate in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.