Shadow Play 4

Prunella Clough was born in London in 1919 - she studied at Chelsea School of Art and during the war worked as a draughtsman of maps and charts. She was a highly influential artist and teacher to the post-war generation. In 1999, three months before her death, she won the prestigious Jerwood painting prize. In 2007 she had a major exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London.

Prunella Clough is widely appreciated as one of the most significant British artists of the post-war period. Clough's work is distinctive and private and yet always responsive to what was going on around her - artistically and visually. Her early work is characterised by the proletarian subject-matter of labour and the urban landscape described within a narrow tonal range. Towards the end of her life she became regarded largely as an abstractionist, but her work always retained a figurative base, as if form had been filtered through memory.