Prunella Clough is one of the most eminent painters to emerge from the United Kingdom in the second half of the 20th century. Across six decades, Clough advanced a constellation of quietly rigorous compositions which both inhabited and unwound the genre of observational painting. Frequently borrowing objets and articles from her immediate urbanscape, Clough maintained a treatment of the world which extracted semiotic, representational latency through whispering and punctilious abstraction.
Across this vast oeuvre, Clough foregrounded a preparatory and expository practice, often utilizing notational documents to capture and distill materials encountered in the world. These discursive units were later embedded and frayed within Clough’s ocular fields, identifiable articles in turn suspended within distinctly non-referential visual material. This pictorial sleight-of-hand, and oscillatory motion between rhetorical and nonlexical, manifested within her work through the form of immense stylistic agility.
“Machines for Seeing” presents nine works by Clough, with a focus towards paintings produced in the final decades of her life. Each of these representations linger above a physical realm, suggestive of industry yet untethered to signification or depictive use value. In maintaining this analogous proximity to articles derived from the world, Clough’s paintings become technological vessels unto themselves, “machines for seeing” as her peer Patrick Heron once suggested of the work. Through the consummation of semantics and playful, pictorial conjecture, Clough’s paintings become irradiated with perceptual thoroughfare—in her suggestive compositions, one is directed to and held firm within the ineffable, phenomenological experience of cognition and sensual machination alike.
at Château Shatto, Los Angeles
until November 19, 2022