Christopher Bucklow (born 1957) is a British artist and art-historian. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in numerous public collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (SFMoMA), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art among others. He has received residencies at The British Museum, London, the Banff Center for the Arts, Alberta, and The Centre for Studies in British Romanticism, Grasmere. Bucklow is best known for his ongoing photographic series Guests (1993–present) and his improvisational paintings from the series To Reach Inside A Vault (2006–present). He is the author of numerous books and essays including The Sea of Time and Space (Wordsworth Trust, 2004), "This is Personal: Blake and Mental Fight" in Blake & Sons, Lifestyles and Mysticism in Contemporary Art (University College, Cork, 2005), What is in the Dwat: The Universe of Guston's Final Decade (Wordsworth Trust, 2007), and the co-author of Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology (Thames & Hudson, 2019).

Life and work

Bucklow was born in Flixton, Greater Manchester, England. He graduated with a degree in art history in 1978. Between 1978 and 1995 he worked as a curator in the Prints & Drawings Department at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London where he researched Romanticism, photography, and developed an interest in the work of William Blake (British, 1757 – 1827). An account of Bucklow's career as a curator and the forces that propelled his transition to art praxis can be found in "Rhetoric and Motive in the Writing of Art History: A Shapeshifter's Perspective" in Remaking Art History (Routledge, New York City; 2007). Bucklow's early work (1989–91) was conceptual and sculptural, often taking the form of plant species that he altered genetically or grafted together. In the 1990s he created two bodies of  photographic work, The Beauty of the World (1991) and Guest - also known as Tetrarchs, that were foundational for Britain's contemporary negative-less photography movement . Guests was created using a 30 x 40-inch pinhole camera, built by Bucklow, with thousands of apertures to make unique cibachrome chromogenic prints. Tetrarchs were created using either a 40 x 60-inch camera, or one with a 40 x 100 inches plate size. Guest (1993–present) features silhouettes of persons that appear to the artist in dreams. Friends, family, and fellow artists like Matthew Barney and Adam Fuss are featured individually in the work as a collective of figures drawn by the multiple solar images directed through the 25,000 apertures in Bucklow's camera. His interest in personal mythology, Jungian dream psychology, metaphor and the use of personification was continued in his subsequent paintings. To Reach Inside A Vault is a series of large scale improvisational paintings in which a commedia dell'arte technique is used to generate the subjects or plot. These paintings were exhibited in Bucklow's 2017 retrospective Said Now, For All Time at the Southampton City Art Gallery, UK.

Public collections

Museum of Modern Art, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Dallas Museum of Art Victoria & Albert Museum The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere Honolulu Museum of Art Herzliya Museum of Art High Museum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Blanton Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art Yale Center for British Art Norton Museum, Palm Beach Perez Art Museum Miami San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Publications

Monographs