Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough (1919–1999) was a British painter and printmaker known for images derived from the overlooked details of the urban and industrial landscape. Factories, railway yards, building sites, machinery, fragments of signage and discarded objects provided recurring subjects, which she gradually transformed into increasingly abstract compositions concerned with shape, texture, colour and surface.

Born in London, Clough studied at Chelsea School of Art from 1937, where she attended classes with Henry Moore. During the Second World War she worked as a cartographer, before returning to painting full-time. In the post-war years she made regular visits to factories, docks, power stations and industrial sites, producing paintings of workers, machinery and the changing environments around London.

During the 1950s Clough became a close friend of the painter and critic John Berger, and the two often went drawing together in the marshalling yards at Willesden Junction. Although her work remained rooted in observation, she increasingly isolated and simplified the forms she encountered, allowing fragments of the visible world to become starting points for more ambiguous and abstract images.

Clough worked slowly, repeatedly revising and reworking her paintings. She used a wide range of tools and materials, sometimes incorporating sand and other substances into the paint to create textured surfaces. As Andrew Graham-Dixon observed, her subjects were drawn from closely observed details of the landscape but were “combined and filtered through memory”, developing through a gradual process of layering and alteration.

Alongside painting and printmaking, Clough assembled and collected found objects and visual fragments, many of which were discovered in her studio after her death. This habit of collecting reflected the same sustained interest in neglected or marginal forms that runs throughout her paintings.

Her work received increasing recognition from the 1970s onwards. A major exhibition of recent paintings was organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1976 and toured to the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 1999, the year of her death, Clough was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting, and a retrospective exhibition was held at Tate Britain in 2007.

Clough’s work is represented in major public collections including Tate and numerous museums and galleries throughout Britain. The Redfern Gallery has continued to exhibit and deal in her work, including paintings from both her early industrial period and her later, more abstract practice.