Prunella Clough (1919-1999) is a highly regarded British artist whose distinctive later abstract works have influenced many notable painters from younger generations. Widely viewed as one of the most singular and significant British artists of the modern post-war period, she found her subject matter by touring London’s industrial wastelands – docks, power stations, factories and scrapyards – creating gritty, urban images. Her work encompassed paintings, collages, drawings, and graphics that increasingly centered on the components of the urban landscape as her art shifted away from representation through various influences, including cubism and European abstraction. “In her paintings subjects previously deemed unworthy of serious consideration in art – the detritus of street and gutter, manual labour, the color of plastics – are transformed into images of compelling mystery and beauty.”
Niece of the architect Eileen Gray, Clough was born into a creative family and trained at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1930s under tutors including Henry Moore and Ceri Richards. During the second world war she drew charts and maps for the Office of War Information and formed friendships with a group of artists including Michael Ayrton, John Craxton, John Minton, Keith Vaughan and the poet Dylan Thomas. She held significant solo exhibitions from the the 1940s onwards including Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1960), Arnolfini, Bristol (1968), Scottish National Gallery for Modern Art, Edinburgh / Serpentine Gallery, London (1976) and Camden Arts Center, London (1996). In 1999 following an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, she won the Jerwood Painting Prize, three months before her death at the age of 80. Tate Britain mounted a major exhibition of her work in 2007. Her work is represented in major institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, 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.