Icon

Made in New York in 1984, Brian Clarke developed this series from a collage featuring William-Adolphe Bouguereau's Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862), cut from the cover on an art magazine. In conversation for the exhibition Brian Clarke: The Art of Light, Clarke explains:

Read more

Made in New York in 1984, Brian Clarke developed this series from a collage featuring William-Adolphe Bouguereau's Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862), cut from the cover on an art magazine. In conversation for the exhibition Brian Clarke: The Art of Light, Clarke explains:

‘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, the organic forms, which he termed ‘amorphs’, would become a recurring element in his work.

A major selection of these works was exhibited alongside the related ‘Opera’ series in Brian Clarke: The Icon Series of Collages at the Robert Fraser Gallery in 1984, and later shown at in exhibitions at the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, and in the Phillips de Pury retrospective, Brian Clarke: Works on Paper 1969–2011 in 2011.

Read less