Biography

Born in London in 1954 and educated at Gloucester College of Art. After graduating Steven Hubbard taught part-time for a period while devoting himself to his own work, developing first a distinguished practice as a portrait painter working mostly to commission and, subsequently, moving on to evolve his own distinctive genre combining painting with craft, which he considers his most rewarding activity. Hubbard was a finalist in the annual BP portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. In 1989 he was short-listed as 'best painter under 35' by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Work of his was also selected for BP Award exhibitions in 1991 and 1993. Steven Hubbard has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1997 and has held one-man exhibitions there in 2000 and 2003. In 2006 he participated in a theme exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery; Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and His World by twenty-five painters today.

Steven Hubbard

Steven Hubbard's constructions, typically executed in an exceptionally wide range of materials from rare woods to canvas, ceramic and wax, enable him to widen the broad span of his agenda while continuing to focus on core aspects of creativity lying at the heart of his interests.

'If the ideas I am exploring', Hubbard comments, 'spring from the same source as many of my techniques, then, more than anywhere, Italy must be this place.' In the 1980s, the artist's mastery of portraiture, recognised in several of the BP award exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, was given a fresh stimulus by his study of the early Italian and Flemish masters, in whose portraits, canvas (or panel) and tabernacle frame were linked in a rich, symbolic relationship. Hubbard's frames, carved, inlaid, sometimes including moving parts, became central to his language as his work took on a three-dimensional aspect.

Hubbard's box constructions evidently owe something to the tradition of surrealism which values so highly the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous elements within a composition. However, unlike an artist such as Joseph Cornell, with whom he shares much of his taste for the allusive and poetic, Hubbard has little interest in found objects. On the contrary, he applies himself energetically to creating afresh every last element in his constructions with an unremitting inventiveness sometimes almost bordering on the perverse, though leavened (again unlike most surrealist work) by a gentle sense of humour.

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