The use of the word ‘iconic’ is criticised for its over-use these days, but few could object to the term being applied to Patrick Caulfield’s legacy of work.
The revered artist produced a body of powerful paintings and prints that are synonymous with the British Pop Art movement of the 1960s and beyond. Playfully balancing a witty formal simplicity (abstraction) and technical prowess (photo-realism) with an ambiguity that whispers of profound, existential subtexts, Caulfield’s art is accessible and enduring.
A Londoner by birth, Caulfield studied (and later taught at) the Chelsea School of Art between 1956 - 60, and at the Royal College of Art, contemporaneous to David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj. In 1964 he was included in the now-legendary ‘New Generation’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery which came to define British Pop Art, making household names of artists including David Hockney, Allen Jones and Bridget Riley.
Caulfield is recorded as having bridled against his categorisation as ‘Pop’ however, rather viewing himself as a ‘formal’ artist. Caulfield was said to be a man of immense self-assurance. This character is intrinsic to his work also, which appears to the viewer to have arrived fully formed: a punch of powerful colour and form with an imperceptible sense of the artist’s hand or process. The reality, in fact, is that each work is meticulously plotted; the distillation of complex ideas, realised through a process of technical sketches and studies.
His work was seldom figurative, instead focused on domestic interiors, empty landscapes and mundane objects, leveraging the “shock of the familiar”, as Caulfield defined it.
His work attests to the fact that, in Caulfield’s world, all is not what it seems – the line between simplicity and complexity being in fact a tightrope he makes his viewers tread.
