Prunella Clough - With Works by Keith Vaughan

Private View: Wednesday 18th September 2024, 6-8pm

We are delighted to present an exhibition of paintings, reliefs and prints by Prunella Clough, one of Britain’s most respected artists’ whose work this gallery has exhibited since the 1980s. It was through the interest in the paintings of Keith Vaughan that John Austin first encountered the work of Vaughan’s great friend, Prunella Clough. The gallery was then fortunate in being able to mount a large exhibition of her paintings in 1997 with several of the works borrowed from her dedicated supporters. When reviewing the show in the Sunday Telegraph, the art critic John McEwan wrote, ‘If Prunella Clough was American she would be on postage stamps’. Since then, Clough’s reputation has grown considerably and her appeal to a younger and wider audience ensures her painting remains relevant. Admired, not only for her accomplishment as an artist but also for the edgy reflections on our post-industrial landscape, a theme which endured throughout her life’s work. The exhibition will be shown alongside a selection of works by Keith Vaughan.

Clough, who admired Leger’s optimism of city life, as well as the townscapes of the Italian renaissance, was determined to give her paintings a contemporary context, rooting her work in the realities of the twentieth century. “Prunella Clough it seems to me, feels deeply the need to recreate the visible world that is common to all of us, to see if freshly and make us aware of it in all its unexpectedness” (Michael Middleton, Prunella Clough: A Retrospective Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1960, p.8). In doing so, Clough rejected fields and forests in favour of the urban and industrial spaces she connected with, distilling the strangeness she encountered into ambiguous yet refined compositions.

In the early 50s the figures who occupied these new spaces would emerge in her painting; fishermen, factory workers, lorry drivers - man shaped by his labour. The exhibition includes a rare small-scale Fishmonger painting, perhaps her most recognisable subject matter from her visits to the docks at Lowestoft between 1949-1951. Woman Minding Machine, 1953 is another painting from this period and one in which Leger’s influence is especially clear. The figure, a worker at the Peek Frean biscuit factory in Bermondsey, is flattened against the semi abstract factory setting; factory and worker inextricably linked.

The late 50s and 60s saw a significant shift in Clough’s painting: the human figure receding, before disappearing altogether with a further move towards abstraction. This was perhaps a natural transition given the geometry of the industrial landscapes that had preoccupied her. Yet her work from this period remains in peripheral spaces, with traces of human presence offering us signals of the degraded world. In the exhibition our attention is drawn to a sweet wrapper, an old typewriter ribbon, a fragment of a flower, different layers of chance experiences combined with a ‘textural intricacy’ and a ‘hard and enduring framework’ so characteristic of her work.

Included from this period is the major painting Landscape through Glass VI from 1959, part of a series of paintings inspired by distortions seen though large expanses of glass at an expo in Brussels which she visited with her aunt, the designer Eileen Grey. The work demonstrates her adeptness in portraying the world half glanced. The series was to form the basis of her 1960 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery curated by Bryan Robertson.

Shown alongside Clough will be paintings, photographs and works on paper by Keith Vaughan. Both Clough and Vaughan, who met in the late 40s and exhibited together, saw their careers launch in the artistic boom of the 1950s. Their friendship was one of mutual appreciation and shared interests in art and literature. Vaughan commented on Clough, ‘she is far more inventive than most of us’.