| Cold War Steve | |
| Birth Name: | Christopher Spencer |
| Birth Place: | Birmingham, West Midlands, England |
| Nationality: | British |
| Style: | Collage |
Cold War Steve is the pen name of Christopher Spencer (born 1975), a British collage artist and satirist. He is the creator of the Twitter feed @coldwarsteve. His work typically depicts a grim, dystopian location in England populated by British media figures, celebrities, and politicians, usually with EastEnders actor Steve McFadden (in character as Phil Mitchell) looking on in disgust.[1] His work has been described as having "captured the mood of Brexit Britain" and has been likened to that of earlier British political satirists Hogarth and Gillray.[2] As of September 2021, his Twitter account has over 345,000 followers.[3]
Spencer was born in Birmingham in 1975. He went to art college at Nuneaton in Warwickshire, where his fellow students included film director Gareth Edwards. He then failed to get into three different universities and subsequently spent the next twenty years working a series of mundane jobs in factories and the public sector. Recovering after an attempted suicide, Spencer concentrated on his art, creating montages on his phone, often while travelling to work by bus.
McFadden's Cold War (the original title of the page) first appeared on Twitter in March 2016. As the title suggested, the work initially concentrated on the Cold War era, inserting Steve McFadden into photographs from the period often featuring Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev. The EU referendum in June 2016 was a watershed in his career and led to his work taking on a more surreal tone. Speaking in December 2018 he said "rather than dealing with it as I've done in the past – which would have been drink or drugs or whatever – I channelled it more into my art. I incorporated other characters, so it's slowly become more satirical and political."[4] The work expanded to include politicians such as Theresa May, Donald Trump, and Kim Jong-un in incongruous settings such as a run-down British working men's club or a derelict flytipping site, alongside British celebrities such as Noel Edmonds, Cliff Richard, Danny Dyer or Cilla Black. McFadden is the one constant in his montages.
He held his first exhibition A Brief History of the World (1953 - 2018) at The Social in London between October and December 2018.[5] The show was attended by comedian Al Murray and Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson.[6]
In November 2018 his first public work, The Fourth Estate, commissioned by RRU News, was unveiled in Williamson Square in Liverpool.[7] The work measuring is inspired by the third panel of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.[8] Other large scale outdoor artwork followed at Glastonbury 2019 (a collaboration with Led By Donkeys) and a piece for the National Galleries of Scotland
In 2019, Cold War Steve published two books with Thames & Hudson:[9] The Festival of Brexit in March, followed by A Prat's Progress in October. A pamphlet of the early work titled McFadden's Cold War also appeared via Rough Trade Books. A third book Journal of the Plague Year was published by Thames & Hudson in October 2021.
Cold War Steve released several limited artworks and jigsaws from 2019 onwards. In October 2020, his Hellscape Jigsaw was nominated for the Design Museum's Beazley Designs of the Year prize.[10] Harold, Trumpscape, 2020, Bluebells and Benny's Babbies all followed in the jigsaw series.
Other works have appeared in The Guardian and The Big Issue.[11] He designed the front cover for the 17 June 2019 issue of Time[12] and on the summer 2022 edition of the New Statesman.[13]
In 2020, Cold War Steve featured in a documentary about his work titled Cold War Steve Meets The Outside World, directed by Kieran Evans and commissioned and broadcast by Sky Arts.[14] The film followed Chris as he put up four large scale outdoor artworks in Medway, Liverpool, Coventry and Bournemouth. The film was shortlisted for the 2021 Grierson Documentary Awards[15] and the exhibition was nominated for the 2021 South Bank Awards.[16]