A few weeks ago I spotted that Shandy Hall in Coxwold, North Yorkshire had a Glen Baxter exhibition planned for the summer. We were really pleased as we both love Glen Baxter's weird and wonderful work, and have never seen an exhibition in the UK.
It's certainly no hardship to visit the pretty village and Shandy Hall is an absolute treat. We visited a few years ago and absolutely loved it then, so a return visit felt like a really good idea. Shandy Hall was home to the 18th century clergyman and experimental noveslist Laurence Sterne, and Shandy Hall is no stranger to the ridiculous and surreal, so it is the ideal place for an exhibition of some of Baxter's wonderful work.
The exhibition was excellent, a really great selection of Baxter's drawings. We walked around chuckling and enjoying the wonderful humour.
Shandy Hall feels like the best place to host a Glen Baxter exhibition, there are many similarities between the work of Laurence Sterne and Glen Baxter - their love of the absurd, the surreal and the eccentric. A couple of centuries may separate these two humourists, but their similarities are unmistakable.
