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Stephen Chambers, by Andrew Lambirth
Of the same 1980s generation as Peter Doig and the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin et al), Stephen Chambers has always pursued a far more maverick, and profoundly more interesting, path. Starting out as a well-regarded, heavy-duty abstract painter while still a student at St Martin’s School of Art, he had his perceptions utterly changed by a spell as a Rome Scholar c.1983, the pursuit of a way of painting that could pin down his intensely sensual response to the complexities of the seen world quickly becoming the preoccupation of a lifetime.
The outcome is paintings which, in their idiosyncratic blending of figurative and abstract elements, defy simple categorisation. Depicting human figures in environments where they seem to be both watching and being watched, their intense colour and complex surfaces speak, as he himself puts it, ‘of states of mind, behaviours and sensibilities’, their often unsettled and disturbed mood at curious odds with the abstract beauties of the paintings themselves.
Consisting of an in-depth interview with the artist and an extensive essay on the development of the work, as well as a detailed study of his studio practice and collaborations with architects and modern dancers (among other things), Andrew Lambirth’s text provides a sympathetic account of an artist of profound culture whose stature must surely grow as that of so many others of his generation will surely fade. And anyone who can say as an artist ‘I want a painting to transport — to take you somewhere you’ve not been before, to surprise you’ has my unequivocal support.
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