1995, Exhibition at the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz

Review, Mainzer Rhein-Zeitung

A Master of His Art

Ken Campbell is a master. That is quite clear to visitors to the Gutenberg Museum as soon as they descend into the large exhibition area - and especially if they have the good fortune to meet the artist there in person. A person who masters everything he needs to turn a book into a mighty work. The Mainz museum of print-art presents in the person of Campbell one of the most important makers of books in Great Britain. 'For me, he is the best', emphasises the Museum's Director, Dr. Eva Hannebutt-Benz.In the display cases and on the walls there are colours and shapes aplenty. Radiant with red, green and blue. To Campbell colour is 'stuff'. Every single one of the eighteen artist books made over the last twenty years are of great attraction. What you see is striking at first glance and full of vitality. As with a poster the nearer you get to the prints and the closer you look the clearer it is that this no mere passing fancy: each page in these voluminous tomes shows itself to be multi-layered, reflective, reaching into subtleties of refinement. Ken Campbell, born in 1939 as the son of a dock-worker, received his training in the 50s and 60s as an apprentice printer and as a designer at the London College of Printing. He is a printer, designer, sculptor and poet. Most of the texts used in his books are his own. He knows that the optical impression of the books is so strong that some people do not enter these poems. How he builds his poetry into his world of images varies a lot. For example you can walk along a folded Leporello of about seven metres in length and read while doing so. Every single book is the result of one year's work. This time is visible, and would also be tactile if you were allowed to touch the paper pages upon which the colour is pressed in thick, plastic layers. There also some very gentle formations like the exceptional, luminous book that Campbell made in 1977 after the death of his father. A work of remembrance and enduring love. Next to the opened pages in the display case you can see the dock-worker's old iron hook.Ken Campbell commands the artistry of his craft to perfection, and in this he is free. The artist develops his language in many directions. A painting, prints and a sculpture can also be seen. "I don't want to repeat myself', he says. Every edition has its own hand print. The complexity of these books is especially fascinating… For each book the artist seems to have given a piece of his soul. For example, there is 'A Knife Romance' of 1988 in which he launches into innumerable technical print experiments with a knife. The knife hovers over the pages, you cannot help but feel its menacing quality. Especially when a hand appears, its finger separated from it. Campbell has shaped a bronze knuckle-duster from this same hand. 'The knife belonged to me and my mother kept burying it, Freud sends his greetings,' he says. In 1993 he created 'Ten Years of Uzbekistan', a book that makes a strong, political statement, a constant reminder of totalitarianism. It is based on the discovery by the English photographer David King, a friend of Campbell's, of a copy of a book designed by the well-known Soviet artist Alexander Rodchenko, and held in that artist's estate. The book had been commissioned in the early thirties to document 10 years of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. In the thirties Stalin started heads rolling and Rodchenko felt obliged to black out their faces where they appeared in his 'designer's copy' of the book. Campbell made a book 'about censorship and what some have to do to survive.' The faces are concealed but the rage shows through to light up this almost forgotten incident of cruelty.

Stefanie Mittenzwei
1995, Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, Mainzer Rhein-Zeitung, Frietag 10 März