Made in New York in 1984, Icon is a series of collages by Brian Clarke developed from an initial collage featuring William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862), cut from the cover of an art magazine. Like the works in his Opera series from the same year, the Icon collages feature columns of computergrams and amorphs set against broad expanses of brushwork, incorporating elements cut from newsprint and hand-painted paper.

In conversation for the exhibition Brian Clarke: The Art of Light, Clarke explained:

“These collages are where I shifted from using the cross and reticules and moved toward something more fluid. I quite consciously did them because I felt myself becoming trapped in the orthogonal thing, and I loved the way paint moved, the organic shapes of cut-out forms. The collages bridged and resolved that.”

Representing a pivotal shift in Clarke’s visual language, the organic forms he termed 'amorphs' became a recurring motif throughout his practice.

A major selection of these works was exhibited in 1984 in Brian Clarke: The Icon Series of Collages at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, in 1998–1999 in Brian Clarke: Malerei und Farbfenster 1977–1988 at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt and in 2011 at the retrospective Brian Clarke: Works on Paper 1969–2011 at Phillips de Pury in London .