As one of the few Pop artists to work primarily with sculpture for over forty years, Barker forms a particularly important part of the Pop Art story. His replications of factory-made consumer goods in gleaming metals and permutations of found objects have been linked to the exotic, the unattainable, the erotic and the romantic and deserved their place on the glamorous centre stage of the art world of the 'Swinging Sixties'. Today, his art continues to surprise with its immediacy and sense of fun that had made it so accessible from the start. In questioning the privileged status of art, Barker's sculpture investigates the fundamentals of the traditional and modernist movements, yet at the same time reveals a passionate commitment to the history of art. Starting in the 1970s, Barker began to examine the Western classical tradition in his frequently mocking and iconoclastic remakes of Greek, Roman and Renaissance art. In Venus with Tongue in Cheek, the celebrated image of the Venus of Milo is playfully transformed by the silhouette of the tongue pushing on the cheek.
The work of Clive Barker is in museum collections worldwide including: National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; British Museum, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Tate, London; Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim; Museum für Modern Kunst, Frankfurt; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.