Prunella Clough

PRUNELLA CLOUGH (1919-1999)

Born in London and trained at Chelsea School of Art, Prunella Clough is widely appreciated as one of the most significant British artists of the post-war period; she was described by Bridget Riley as ‘unmistakably a modern painter.’

Clough's work is distinctive and private and yet always responsive to what was going on around her. Having worked as a cartographer during the second World War, she developed a visual language for the changing boundaries between rural and urban in her paintings, drawing inspiration from industrial wastelands. Her early work is characterised by the subject of labour and the urban landscape, finding beauty in overlooked environments. Towards the end of her life, Clough became regarded largely as an abstractionist, but her work always retained a figurative base. In her late paintings, she incorporated the found detritus of advanced capitalism into a language of minimalist abstraction. 

Clough worked with a variety of mediums; in the 1940s she produced several prints, mostly in small editions using her lithographic press, and went on to create limited editions of etchings. Approaching the 1950s, she began making monotypes, initially with printing ink and glass, then moving on to Lino printing.   

Prunella Clough's first solo exhibition was in 1947 at Leger Galleries, London, where she exhibited small still lives and landscapes. A touring retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960 gained Clough significant recognition within the art world. In 1999, three months before her death, she won the Jerwood painting prize. In 2007 Tate, London, had a retrospective survey of her career which was followed by a retrospective on the centenary of her birth in 2019 at Pallant House, Chichester. 

Prunella Clough's work is held in major collections, including Tate, London; Courtauld Gallery, London; the Government Art Collection; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.