Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Friedrichshain

June

Prunella Clough: A small thing edgily

with works by Amy Sillman, Hayley Tompkins and Merlin James

9. September – 30. Oktober 2021

Prunella Clough (*1919-1999, London) set out to “say a small thing edgily,” an approach to painting that guided her practice, from her figurative representations of ports, lorries and pockets of industrial wasteland in mid 20th-century England to her decisive shift to abstraction in the early 1960s. This exhibition at June, the first presentation of Clough’s work in Germany, focuses on her shape-shifting abstraction, bringing together paintings made between 1960 and 1993.

To say a small thing edgily is to make a compressed statement, to remain open to contingency, to pay attention to the scraps and fragments that litter everyday life. Clough likened the shapes that she sifted from her surroundings—debris on a beach, a rusted padlock, plastic toys, a stain on a concrete wall—to “burrs stuck in the brain,” transmuting these vaguely abject forms in paint. Through persistent experimentation, Clough developed an ever-evolving system of signs: they’re cumbrous, precarious, wayward, aloof. She played with mark and texture, sometimes gritting the surface of the canvas with marble powder or ash, and usually worked in muted, earthen tones. Her careful compositions push at the boundaries of balance; they’re on the verge.