Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1938 where her tutors were influential artists of the day including Ceri Richards, Julian Trevelyan and Henry Moore, and later she also studied part-time at Camberwell School of Art with Victor Pasmore. She began exhibiting small still-lives and landscapes and had her first solo show in 1947 at Leger Galleries, London. Clough found her subjects by touring London’s industrial wastelands and bombsites - docks, power stations, factories and scrapyards - creating gritty, urban images.

 

Her rise to prominence followed her touring retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960. Her work - comprising paintings, collages, drawings, reliefs and graphics - increasingly centred on the components of the cityscape as her art shifted away from representation through various influences including cubism and European abstraction.  Her abstract works often contrast colours and sometimes found objects and reveal her continual and personal preoccupation with formal qualities – composition, colour and texture - and her delight in the edginess and abstraction of everyday objects and experiences. 

 

A study of Clough’s works across the span of her career highlights the way in which she worked alongside her peers, drawing on art historical movements of her time, whilst always maintaining a distinctive way of seeing and painting that is deeply personal and acutely responsive to her surroundings.  She was a highly influential artist and teacher to the post-war generation. In 1999, at the age of 80, she won the prestigious Jerwood painting prize. In 2007 a major exhibition of her work was held at the Tate Gallery, London.  Clough’s work is collected  widely and represented in major public galleries and museums around the world including V & A London, Tate Gallery, London, British Museum, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Wakefield City Art Gallery, Yorkshire.

Woman Minding Machine - Prunella Clough

Woman Minding Machine - Prunella Clough

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