Brian Clarke: Microcosm (Stained Glass and Paintings)

Brian Clarke: Microcosm (Stained Glass and Paintings) is the combined catalogue for the travelling exhibitions Brian Clarke: Stained Glass and Brian Clarke: Paintings 1976–1987, held at the Seibu Museum of Art/Yurakacho Art Forum, Tokyo, and the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 1986 and 1987, and at the Seibu Museum and the Yao Seibu Exhibition Hall, Osaka in 1987, respectively. These shows were combined into a retrospective at the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in 1987.

Brian Clarke: Microcosm (Stained Glass and Paintings) is the combined catalogue for the travelling exhibitions Brian Clarke: Stained Glass and Brian Clarke: Paintings 1976–1987, held at the Seibu Museum of Art/Yurakacho Art Forum, Tokyo, and the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 1986 and 1987, and at the Seibu Museum and the Yao Seibu Exhibition Hall, Osaka in 1987, respectively. These shows were combined into a retrospective at the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in 1987.

With text in English and Japanese, this book features contributions from architect Norman Foster, art critic Junji Itō and a conversation between Paul Beldock and Brian Clarke. Its 50 pages of colour plates span Clarke’s broad output in stained glass, painting, collage, print and mosaic from 1976 to 1987.

Beldock describes these works:

‘Brian Clarke has now produced a highly abstract but passionate art, heraldic, filled with emblems and symbolic colours, always displaying the fundamental dualities with which we measure our human experience, static-dynamic, order-chaos, clarity-obscurity. He has created a visual language that functions in almost all media.’