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§ Prunella Clough (1919-1999) Old Wreath signed to the reverseoil on canvas51 x 63.5cmProvenance: With Annely Juda Fine Art, LondonExhibited:London, Annely Juda Fine Art, Prunella Clough Recent Paintings, 24 September - 30 October 1993, cat. no.8There can be no doubt that Prunella Clough is one of the most significant post-war artists to have emerged from Britain. Though her work has appeared in many guises, from her early figurative efforts to the late minimalist abstraction she is remembered for today, the thread that runs through the entire body of Clough’s work is her dogged and unwavering commitment to a singular artistic vision and a refusal to adhere to the fashions of the day.The daughter of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic mother and a poet father, Clough was keen to shed the skin of her wealthy upbringing in Belgravia, an aspiration which appears to have manifested in her chosen subject matter. After completing her studies at Chelsea School of Art, under the tutelage of Ceri Richards, Henry Moore and Julien Trevelyan, and briefly working as a cartographer during World War II, Clough began to settle into her artistic practice. On her frequent solo urban safaris, Clough gathered inspiration from London’s industrial Badlands – the docks, scrap yards, factories, and power stations, the pavements, the puddles, and the discarded detritus of urban life. In her late work, Clough transforms the banal, the oblique and the neglected into objects of fascination through her precise and sophisticated use of colour and her innovative elastic perspective, which encourages her viewers to question whether they are viewing her subjects on a macro or micro scale.Canvas in plane and with good tension. The surface with an overall grubby appearance commensurate with age, would perhaps benefit from a very light clean. One very small area of paint loss in the lower left quadrant and the top right quadrant with some instances of raised, but intact impasto and the top left quadrant with a very minor loss along the grey border. Some light scattered accretions, most notably a small reddish mark between the two upward facing petals, but overall in nice condition.
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