Clive Barker is a an award winning Pop Artist who is well known for creating a range of objects cast or formed in  metal.

Born in Luton,  Barker enrolled at the Luton College of Technology and Art in 1957. However, it was not Barker's two years at Art School that were to prove the most formative but his fifteen months spent working on the assembly line at Vauxhall Motors. It was here he 'witnessed the precision and beauty of the freshly fabricated automobiles clad in gleaming metal and upholstered in sensuous leather' (see A. Fermon & M. Livingstone, Clive Barker Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné 1958-2000, Milan, 2002, p. 7). His choice of materials and how they were finished was largely inspired by Barker's time spent there. Barker relied (and still does to this day) on specialist fabricators to achieve the optimum final result for his works. Marcel Duchamp's idea of the ready-made was easy for Barker to accept. However, quite differently, Barker does not simply utilize objects as he finds them. Specialist fabricators are either commissioned by him to make objects to his designs or he recasts or resurfaces original objects so they become non-functional successors. These objects are often playful, in this case the viewer is confronted with a boat seemingly created out of folded bronze, identical to a paper boat yet unable to fulfill its purpose of floating. As with much Pop Art the viewer is presented an eveyday object which has been transformed into an art work which makes one question the original object and its place in modern culture.

Barker has had numerous one man exhibitions starting in the 60's and going through to the present day and has been incuded in many International exhibitions on Pop Art incuding  ‘Pop Art U.S.A – U.K.: American and British Artists of the ‘60s in the ‘80s’, Tokyo (1987) and 'Pop Art', Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991).

His work is present in private and museum collections including the Tate London, the British Museum London, the National Portrait Gallery London, the Victoria and Albert museum London, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, the National Gallery of South Australia Adelaide, the Berardo Collection Museum Lisbon, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.