Anthony Slessor

Biography

Anthony Slessor was born in 1954 in Lincolnshire, England. After graduation from Durham University he served in the British Army as an infantryman and pilot. At the age of 38 he resigned and became an art student in Cheltenham. He went on to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and Christ Church, Oxford University, where he won the Mitzi Cunliffe sculpture prize (uniquely in his first year), and subsequently graduated with a first class honours. After a further two years at the Ruskin both working in the sculpture department and teaching life drawing, he moved onto a Master’s degree. Throughout this period he continued to fly helicopters in the military reserves and also in civil aviation.

After his Master’s, there followed seven years of teaching art, soldiering in the Middle East and with the European Force in Sarajevo, investigating organized crime across the Balkans, and service on loan to the Government of Sierra Leone.

In 2009 he discarded his various eclectic incarnations and reverted to his studio-based practice, working as a painter and sculptor in Slovenia and on the Dalmatian coast. In 2013 he returned to the UK.

Over the last 17 years his work has been seen in exhibitions in Oxford, Reading, Cheltenham, and his last one-man show in Zagreb, an installation at the new RaGa gallery which ran through to September 2012.