Wendy Anderson, Prunella Clough, Dan Roach
8 June – 7 July 2023
‘Of course nothing is more beautiful than an old floor – unless it is a painting?’ (Patrick Heron, 1989)
The Eagle Gallery’s exhibition Left Over takes its title from a 1991 oil on canvas painting by Prunella Clough (1919–1999), which is featured alongside recent work by Wendy Anderson and Dan Roach.
Clough’s highly individual paintings focus on seemingly incidental subject matter. They are slow burn and ambiguous, with physical qualities that attune the viewer ‘to certain realities which immediately become overwhelmingly visually available to you as you walk away down the pavement.’ (P. H.).
The exhibition pays tribute to her enduring influence on British art and on many painters practising today who continue to respond to her subtleties. We are delighted to have the opportunity to exhibit the historic work in relation to paintings by two contemporary artists, whose images, like her’s, make visual the traces and residues of human experience.
From 2007–2019 Wendy Anderson travelled extensively as a result of her role as Director of International Development for CCW, University of the Arts, London. Her studio practice was interrupted for long periods while she taught in countries including Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, Singapore and Ukraine. At night in her hotel room, unable to paint, she filled sketch books with drawings, tickets, magazine pages, numbers from addresses, conference rooms, plane bookings.
The incremental source material was the starting point for a powerful series of paintings that combine hand-made oil pigments, collage, rubbings and lipstick prints of the artist’s mouth: ‘My lips, breath and lungs, a kind of self portrait.’ (W. A. 2023). Architectonic forms suggest a kind of ‘ur’ language, with repeated motifs of stilt-like structures set against the pulsating painted ground. The canvases are worked in a range of Cadmium reds and dark earth tones, stuck with newsprint and cut paper shapes, as if memory is literally embedded in their surfaces.
Dan Roach paints in a cooler register. His images explore airy spatial ambiguities, with abstract forms poised at particular points within the picture plane to create moments of tension and painterly incident. The paintings could be said to describe sensation, or phenomena – the stillness of air before a storm, or the movement of clouds.
His recent work has developed from a project begun in 2020 with the painter Rebecca Sitar which explored ideas about ‘lost objects’ as a basis for imagery that fell into neither purely abstract or figurative territories. Two exhibitions ‘Mudlarks‘, Eagle Gallery Cabinet Room (2021) and Oceans Apart, Manchester (2022) showed a series of paintings that spoke powerfully of the ‘speechless’ presence of painting – of the physical object – that can carry pictorially an expression of the mind’s thoughts.
Prunella Clough Left Over (1991) is shown courtesy of Annely Juda Fine Art, London.
Patrick Heron is quoted from: Prunella Clough Recent Paintings 1980–1989, Annely Juda Fine Art, London.
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