Steven Martin Cox (born 1958) is an

English Australian English Australians, also known as Anglo-Australians, are Australians whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England. In the 2021 census, 8,385,928 people, or 33% of the Australian population, stated that they had English ancestry (wh ...

artist and writer, known for his homoerotic images;

stream of consciousness In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. It is usually in the form of an interior monologue which ...

landscapes and animal/human hybrids. He writes art-related and queer-related articles and reviews for various publications.

Early life and education

Cox was born in

Harringay Harringay (pronounced ) is a district of north London, England, within the London Borough of Haringey. It is centred on the section of Green Lanes running between the New River, where it crosses Green Lanes by Finsbury Park, and Duckett's ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

and arrived in

Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

in 1968, when his family emigrated. He studied painting at the

Victorian College of the Arts The Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) is the arts school at the University of Melbourne in Australia. It is part of the university's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music (FFAM). It is located near the Melbourne city centre on the Southbank campus ...

from 1978 to 1980, where one of his main lecturers was Gareth Sansom. In 1983 he was awarded the Keith & Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship and subsequently spent eighteen months making work in London and

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

. Also in 1983, he was included in the important survey of Australian art, ''Perspecta'', at the

Art Gallery of New South Wales The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), founded as the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1872 and known as the National Art Gallery of New South Wales between 1883 and 1958, is located in The Domain, Sydney, Australia. It is the most import ...

. In 1989 he was awarded an

Australia Council Creative Australia, formerly known as the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australia Council, is the country's official arts council, serving as an arts funding and advisory body for the Government of Australia. The council was announ ...

grant to spend three months making work at the Villa Ghedini, in

Besozzo Besozzo is a town and municipality located in the province of Varese, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. Besozzo hosts a small historical centre with churches and noble houses, so-called Palazzi, in its upper part which is in part pedestrian ...

Northern Italy Northern Italy (, , ) is a geographical and cultural region in the northern part of Italy. The Italian National Institute of Statistics defines the region as encompassing the four Northwest Italy, northwestern Regions of Italy, regions of Piedmo ...

. In 1997, Cox completed a master's degree in Fine Art at Deakin University; his thesis, which was in two parts: the first centred around the notion of a causal link between the creative act of the artist and the destructive act of the serial murderer; the second researched the life, work and death of British playwright

Joe Orton John Kingsley Orton (1 January 1933 – 9 August 1967), known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967 committed by his partner, was short but highly i ...

. Cox has written numerous essays and articles on the suppression of homo-eroticism in western art since the Renaissance, and the ways in which artists have managed to circumvent this censure.

Career

His early work dealt with the aberrant psychology of murderers and their victims. In 1987 he staged an exhibition of paintings, 'Beyond Belief', which documented the crimes of the 1960s British Moors murderers. The show was largely based upon the 1967 book by

Emlyn Williams George Emlyn Williams, CBE (26 November 1905 – 25 September 1987) was a Welsh writer, dramatist and actor. Early life Williams was born into a Welsh-speaking, working class family at 1 Jones Terrace, Pen-y-ffordd, Ffynnongroyw, Flintshi ...

, Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection. Over the years, the artist has obsessively collected more than a dozen copies of the book, in both hardback and paperback versions. Cox has also exhibited paintings of the serial killers

Dennis Nilsen Dennis Andrew Nilsen (23 November 1945 – 12 May 2018) was a Scottish serial killer and Necrophilia, necrophile who murdered at least twelve young men and boys between 1978 and 1983. Convicted at the Old Bailey of six counts of murder and two ...

Peter Manuel Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel (13 March 1927 – 11 July 1958) was an American-Scottish serial killer who was convicted of murdering seven people across Lanarkshire and southern Scotland between 1956 and his arrest in January 1958, and is believ ...

, and Peter Kurten amongst others - the latter work being acquired for the permanent collection of the

National Gallery of Victoria The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria (state), Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and list of most visited art museums in the world, most visited art mu ...

, Melbourne. In 1995, his exhibition ''Kinderspiel (Child’s Play)'' dealt exclusively with the subject of children who kill other children. His 1996 Masters Thesis (

Deakin University Deakin University is a public university in Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1974 with antecedent history since 1887, the university was named after Alfred Deakin, the second Prime Minister of Australia and a founding father of Australian Fede ...

), titled ‘Murder and Art: the Causal Links’, drew parallels between the creative mind of the artist and the murderous mind of the serial killer. Cox has explored the phenomena of dance culture, a subject that has spawned five exhibitions of portraits of clubbers, party-drug takers and bouncers, most notably in ''Rave: Club Culture'' (2000), ''Ecstasy: a celebration'' (2000) and ''Confessions of a Raving Lunatic'' (2002). As an out gay artist, Cox has often featured

homoeroticism Homoeroticism is sexual attraction between members of the same sex, including both male–male and female–female attraction. The concept differs from the concept of homosexuality: it refers specifically to the desire itself, which can be tempor ...

within his work. His exhibition ''

Testosterone Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone and androgen in Male, males. In humans, testosterone plays a key role in the development of Male reproductive system, male reproductive tissues such as testicles and prostate, as well as promoting se ...

Zone'' (1996) dealt with, amongst other things, frank

male nudity Nudity is the state of being in which a human is without clothing. While estimates vary, for the first 90,000 years of pre-history, anatomically modern humans were naked, having lost their body hair, living in hospitable climates, and not ...

and the still-existing taboo over public representations of male genitalia. To this end, he has always been outspoken against censorship in the arts, as seen in an interview in issue 11 of Artist Profile magazine (2010). and Cox's article, commissioned by The Guardian,. For decades, Cox's imagery has often been surreal, using unsettling juxtapositions of symbols. In ''The New Agrarian'' (1991), a partially nude boxer spars alone in front of a blackboard in an otherwise empty field. In ''Jelly Kitten'' (2005) a cartoon cat's head is simultaneously a portrait of a cute children's cartoon character and a tormented mind, perhaps reminiscent of

Sidney Nolan Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (22 April 191728 November 1992) was one of the leading Australian artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of media, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art. He is best known ...

's Gallipoli series, which featured portraits of returned soldiers. In 2016, Cox was commissioned to paint a massive mural on the wall of the restaurant, Grub Food Van, in Fitzroy, Melbourne. He based this major work on

Titian Tiziano Vecellio (; 27 August 1576), Latinized as Titianus, hence known in English as Titian ( ), was an Italian Renaissance painter, the most important artist of Renaissance Venetian painting. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno. Ti ...

's Bacchus and Ariadne, in the

National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of more than 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current di ...

, London.

Exhibitions

Since 1982 he has staged over thirty-five one-person exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and has participated in over fifty group-exhibitions, including ''Moist: Australian Watercolours'', (2005) at the

National Gallery of Australia The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in th ...

Canberra Canberra ( ; ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the Federation of Australia, federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's list of cities in Australia, largest in ...

, and ''This and Other Worlds'', (2005) at the

, Melbourne. In 2008 he was included in ''True Crime: Murder and Misdemeanour in Australian Art'', at the Geelong Art Gallery.''True Crime: Murder and Misdemeanour in Australian Art'' catalogue, Geelong Art Gallery, 2008.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cox, Steve Gay painters Australian gay artists English gay artists Australian LGBTQ painters English LGBTQ painters Artists from Melbourne Australian contemporary painters LGBTQ people from London People from Harringay Victorian College of the Arts alumni 1958 births Living people 20th-century Australian artists

Early life and education

Career

Exhibitions

See also

References