Prunella Clough, Wire and Demolition 1982. Tate. © The estate of Prunella Clough.
14 rooms in Modern and Contemporary British Art
‘Anything that the eye or the mind’s eye sees with intensity and excitement will do for a start; a gasometer is as good as a garden, probably better’ – Prunella Clough, 1949
Prunella Clough (1919–99) was fascinated by urban and industrial landscapes – what she called ‘urbscapes’. She painted places and things that were forgotten and overlooked. Dockyards, wastelands and factories appear in her work, as well as the discarded, mass-produced objects she found littering the contemporary urban environment. In a style that hovers between abstraction and figuration, Clough teased images of unexpected resonance and beauty from everyday subjects.
Born in London, Clough enrolled at Chelsea School of Art in 1937. Her studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which she drew maps and charts for the US Office of War Information. Although her early work focused on fishermen, lorry drivers and factory workers, Clough soon abandoned the human figure, turning her attention to capturing and distilling the forms, colours and textures of her urban surroundings. Despite this, a persistent human presence lingers on in her work, through her fascination with the traces left by people on the landscape.
Clough maintained that ‘nothing that I do is “abstract”. I can locate all the ingredients of a painting in the richness of the outside world,the world of perception.’ Her paintings offer a different way of looking: familiar things glimpsed fleetingly, scrutinised close-up, or filtered through memory. As the artist Patrick Heron wrote, ‘her paintings are machines for seeing with.'