Meet the Former Probation Officer Whose Viral Political Collages Have Become an International Symbol of Brexit

Thousands of civil servants are being redeployed across the UK
as Boris Johnson’s government ramps up preparations for a no-deal
Brexit. But for one civil servant, the deepening national crisis
has meant a very different kind of career change. Christopher
Spencer, also known as Cold War Steve, is now a full-time,
in-demand artist.

Hot on the heels of a TIME magazine cover story
featuring his satirical photo-collages, the artist has created a
Brexit-inspired mural commissioned by the National Galleries of
Scotland. The work was unveiled on Sunday, two days before Johnson
announced that his plans to suspend Parliament next month—either a
bold move or a dictatorial one, depending on your point of view
about the prime minister’s promise to force through Brexit “do or
die” by Halloween.

“It just gets more absurd by the day,” says Spencer, who worked
as a probation officer in Birmingham before taking a leave of
absence to focus on art full time. “I’m just so glad I’m doing what
I’m doing with my art because it supplies me with endless material.
But I would give it up in a heartbeat for [Britain] to just to go
back to some semblance of normality.”

Spencer confesses that the line between reality and his
dystopian, surreal, and satirical work is getting increasingly
blurred. “We’ve now got a prime minister elected by 0.2 percent of
the population shutting down government to force through a no-deal
Brexit, when the whole argument for Brexit in the first place was
parliamentary sovereignty,” he tells artnet News. He was speaking
just as the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson,
announced her decision to step down, citing “conflict over Brexit,”
as a contributing factor.

The artist’s latest work—a new photo-montage mural outside the
entrance of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art—is
atypically upbeat, albeit laced with his usual irony. Called
Harold, the Ghost of Lost Futures, it offers a Peter
Blake-style collage of Spencer’s cultural heroes gathered at the
British seaside. Martin Creed’s light piece proclaiming “Everything
Is Going To Be Alright” appears on the pier in the background. The
crowded foreground includes Turner Prize-winning artists Jeremy
Deller, Lubaina Himid, and Grayson Perry, television creator Phoebe
Waller-Bridge, and many others. (Perry quickly tweeted that he felt
“ennobled” to be included.) Stormzy also appears prominently,
clad in the Bansky-designed
stab-proof vest the rapper wore at this summer’s
Glastonbury Festival, where he led a “Fuck Boris” call-and-response
chant.

While TIME magazine assigned Spencer a very
rigid brief, the National Galleries gave him a wide remit—but they
were nervous about him showing politicians. So, the artist says, “I
thought let’s spin Brexit on the head, and do something vibrant and
positive for a change with nice, brilliant people in it, not
horrible idiots like Johnson or [Brexit Party leader Nigel] Farage.”

The moment of levity did not last long. Spencer’s newest work,
now in progress, is a piece made in rapid response to Johnson’s
bombshell announcement about suspending Parliament for five weeks
this fall, which will greatly limit opposition MPs’ chance to block
a no-deal Brexit through legislation. The artist confesses that
after he did such a positive work for Edinburgh, it was hard to get
back into looking for suitable images of Johnson. “With yesterday’s
news, I’ve had to get straight on it,” he says, referring to
proroguing Parliament. “If Britain was scorched to the ground, he’d
be happy as long as he was Prime Minister.”

Civil Servant Who Came in From the
Cold 

Spencer first began making surreal artworks focused on the Cold
War era three years ago. The Birmingham-based artist created them
on his smartphone while commuting on the bus to work in the
probation service. As British politics became more and more
surreal, his work took off. Since 2016, his Twitter following has
soared to nearly 200,000.

Last November, he unveiled his first public work, a
Brexit-themed mural inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, in Liverpool in
the North of England. Other institutions have taken notice as well,
including the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, which used his work
as inspiration for a show of student art responding to the
political climate. His piece for the National Galleries of Scotland
coincides with its exhibition about collage art, called “Cut and
Paste.” “It is mind-blowing to be shown alongside, sort of, artists
such as Picasso, Peter Blake, Jamie Reid, and Louise Nevelson,”
Spencer says.

The artist is currently on sabbatical from his day job.
Balancing both “was getting quite difficult,” he says. He was also
mindful that as a civil servant, he was supposed to be politically
impartial. But he credits his employer with being supportive. “They
said, ‘See if you can make a career of it,’” he notes. He now sells
limited edition prints of his work with the help of Carl Gosling,
the artist’s “manager stroke friend stroke
person-who-sorts-everything-out.”

With the fallout of Brexit looking likely to last years, not
months, there will be no shortage of material. “It shows no sign of
getting any better,” Spencer says. Looking ahead, he also hopes to
further mine the relationship between the political situation in
the UK and the United States. “When [British caricaturist and
political cartoonist James] Gillray was doing his stuff, there was
the Prince Regent and Napoleon and all these grotesque characters,”
he says. “Now we have Trump and Johnson.” Steve Bannon, Trump, and
Vladimir Putin have all already featured in Spencer’s work.

The artist published his first book this spring, and has a
second due out in October. He also wants to publish one to coincide
with the 2020 US presidential election, so he has been drawing on
Edward Hopper’s art for inspiration, creating Shitehawks,
a twist on the famous late-night cafe scene that features Trump,
Johnson, and other figures.

His first book, Cold War Steve Presents…The Festival of
Brexit, was a reference to the former UK Prime Minister
Theresa May’s much-derided Festival of Great Britain, a pricey
celebration of British culture that was intended to mark Brexit.
The Department for Digital Culture, Media, and Sport is still
working on a UK-wide arts festival in 2022, artnet News
understands. The fact that the festival is still being planned deep
in the heart of Whitehall by civil servants surprises Spencer as it
was so widely ridiculed. But that doesn’t mean he would turn down
an invitation.

“I would love to create an installation piece,” he
says. “People were saying ‘Cold War Steve should curate it.’ I
would be happy to be the Festival of Brexit’s creative
director.”

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Collages Have Become an International Symbol of Brexit appeared
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