1st November - 22nd December 2000

Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough, one of the most important pioneers of British abstract art of the twentieth century, died on Boxing Day 1999, aged 80. She always remained both elusive and extremely modest about herself and her considerable achievements.

She resisted all attempts to organise museum retrospective exhibitions of her work during her lifetime, and this memorial exhibition aims to provide a glimpse of her paintings from different periods over the last 50 years, with special emphasis on her magnificent abstract oil paintings of the last decade. As visitors to the exhibition will quickly become aware, there is no other painter with an eye quite like Prunella Clough’s, and no painting of hers was quite like another.

Prunella departed on a high note. Her last exhibition was characteristically modest in size and held at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. It still holds the record for attendance figures there and every single major newspaper covered the exhibition. A month later she was the well deserved winner of the Jerwood Prize for Painting. Given accolades like these as The Times put it “It is a serious mystery why Prunella Clough is not celebrated as a national treasure”.

This exhibition will come as a refreshing change to collectors of British Art who are interested in solid hard-won reputations. Prunella created paintings that challenge the viewer to understand the very profound emotional depth that resonates within her images - like seeing the passage of thoughts or the distillation of remembered moments.

Her achievements deserve to be better understood both by a British and an international public. This exhibition is the first step in that process which should be furthered by museums and other galleries.

Prunella Clough 71 page colour cat. 36 colour illustratations. £12 (£8 student price)