I like a very structured painting … I simply try to make a logical, a seemingly logical, space that could exist.
– Patrick Caulfield
Patrick Caulfield’s (1936-2005) prodigious artistic output consists predominantly of deceptively simple paintings and screenprints, rendered in block colours that flatten the visual plain. His works draw attention to the intimate, material, and often unnoticed details of everyday interiors with stark awareness and vibrancy. Steeped in rich art historical knowledge, Caulfield’s pictures frequently reference or appropriate imagery from seminal Old Master, Modern, and Cubist painters, filtering them through a distinctively contemporary graphic lens.
Caulfield was born in West London in 1936 and showed early interest in art. In 1956, he enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art, where his earliest works exploring the intersections between design and painting were produced. In 1960, following his time at the Chelsea School, he moved on to the Royal College of Art. It was here that he truly began honing his unique artistic language, alongside fellow students David Hockney, RB Kitaj, and Allen Jones.
He completed his studies at the Royal College in 1963. The following year, his inclusion in the New Generation: 1964 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (alongside contemporaries like Hockney, Jones, and Bridget Riley) cemented his place in the Modern British vanguard.
It was at this stage that Caulfield began developing what would become his signature painting style; one characterised by mass advertising-inspired flat expanses of colour that are often punctuated by intricate hyperrealist and trompe l'oeil elements. He would go on to hone this aesthetic sensibility throughout his career in both painted and printed mediums, producing works typified by both immense rigidity and visual playfulness.
Caulfield’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions across the UK and internationally. He has had multiple retrospective shows, including at the Tate Gallery, London (now Tate Britain) (1981) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (1992) during his lifetime, and posthumously at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2009) and Tate Britain, London (2013). His art is held in prominent collections internationally, including those of Tate, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Museum of Australia, Canberra.
