Patrick Caulfield is one of the most widely admired painters of his generation. He is often associated with Pop art, with its highly stylised images of everyday objects. Caulfield remains wary of such associations. Instead he relates his work to a tradition of earlier modern art, citing Cubist painters such as Juan Gris and Fernand Leger as key influences on his work.

Since the early 1960s Caulfield has produced memorable paintings of still lives, interiors and landscapes. Using the hard linear technique of the sign-painter, he represents ordinary or familiar objects as graphic motifs.

Despite using formal techniques associated with Pop culture, his interest in pictorial composition and choice of subject matter has remained predominantly traditional. In contrast to the concern with the superficial and the immediate characteristic of Pop art, Caulfield says that ‘The things I choose to do are nearly symbolic and also open to degrees of interpretation’.

This display focuses on the development of Caulfield’s early work, in the five years from 1962 to 1967, during and after his graduation from the Royal College of Art. It highlights the artist’s remarkably rapid and sophisticated development of a precise and detached formal language.

This display has been devised by curator Clarrie Wallis

BP British Art Displays 1500-2005