Career
His early work dealt with the aberrant psychology of murderers and their victims. In 1987 he staged an exhibition of paintings about the 1960s British Moors murderers. Cox has also painted pictures of serial killers Dennis Nilsen and Peter Manuel. In 1995, his exhibition Kinderspiel (Child’s Play) dealt exclusively with the subject of children who kill other children. His 1996 Masters Thesis (Deakin University), titled ‘Murder and Art: the Causal Links’, drew parallels between the creative mind of the artist and the murderous mind of the serial killer.
More recently, Steve Cox's work has explored the phenomena of dance culture; this subject has spawned five exhibitions of portraits of clubbers, drug takers and bouncers, most notably in Rave: Club Culture (2000), Ecstasy: a celebration (2000) and Confessions of a Raving Lunatic (2002).
As a gay artist, Cox has often featured homoeroticism within his work. His exhibition Testosterone Zone (1996) dealt with, amongst other things, frank male nudity and the still-existing taboo over public representations of male genitalia. To this end, he has always been outspoken against censorship in the arts, as seen in an interview in issue 11 of Artist Profile magazine (2010).
For decades, Cox's imagery has often been surreal, using unsettling juxtapositions of symbols. In The New Agrarian (1991), a partially nude boxer spars alone in front of a blackboard in an otherwise empty field. In Jelly Kitten (2005) a cartoon cat's head is simultaneously a portrait of a cute children's cartoon character and a tormented mind, much like Sidney Nolan's Gallipoli series, which featured portraits of returned soldiers.
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