One of the most important British painters of the post-war period, Prunella Clough (1919 – 1999) was a distinctive artist whose inspirations lay initially with the concealed beauty of Britain's industrial landscapes, before later shifting her attention to post-industrial urban scenes of London corner shops and markets, or souvenir stalls at decaying seaside resorts.
This exhibition focuses on works from the latter phase of Clough’s extensive career, from the 1960s to just a few years before her death. Prunella Clough was widely regarded as an abstract painter, however her work always retained a figurative base, as it gave new form to the unnoticed or ignored and incorporated the found detritus of advanced capitalism into a language of characteristic minimalist abstraction.
"Figures had vanished from her work and she had begun to experiment with abstraction, becoming one of the most original and continuously inventive practitioners in this field, creating a perverse yet exhilarating diversity of imagery. But the source of her ideas still came from the environment. She was wary of abstract art that had no connection with the outside world. She stressed the need to go on looking and finding excitement in things, even if it was, as she told Simon Betts, an MA student at Chelsea, just a sweetpaper on a pavement." - Frances Spalding, The Guardian, 2012