About

Michael Alexander Campbell (b. 1999, United Kingdom) grew up in Zuoz, in Switzerland’s Engadin Valley, and lives and works in New York. He studied Fine Art at Lancaster University in England, earning a Bachelor’s degree with honours. He subsequently completed a one-year apprenticeship in New York under artist Julian Schnabel.

Campbell creates large-scale oil paintings that dwell in the moment just before representation. His reference images range from his own photography to historical illustrations. Through distortion, he transforms these sources, allowing their underlying structures to emerge through essential shapes, rhythms and compositional tensions. His paintings bring together a circus troupe of characters drawn from folklore, mythology and popular imagery. What remains is an echo of the original image, freed from the burden of its subject matter, where narrative persists beyond its immediate form, much like myths that endure over time even as their characters change.

His paintings combine vibrant, at times psychedelic colour with passages of meticulous, classical brushwork. The result is a body of work that is simultaneously raw and refined.