British artist Patrick Caulfield, noted for his sparse, precise studies of interiors and still life, has died, a gallery said on Friday. He was 69.
Caulfield died on Thursday in London, according to the Waddington Gallery, which has represented the artist for more than 30 years.
Coming out in the 1960s generation of artists, Caulfield’s bold images were often associated with pop art.
However, the catalogue for a 1999 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London said Caulfield’s work ”addresses the central concerns of European painting: how light falls, how space is organised, how to reconcile different ways of looking at things”.
”Patrick Caulfield was one of the most original image makers in a talented generation of British artists,” said Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries.
”His still lifes and interiors captured mood and decor with incisive style,” he said.
In a 1999 interview with The Observer newspaper, Caulfield said his interest in interiors developed in art school as a reaction against social realism.
”So, I tried to do things that were really alien to me, invented interiors that I had never seen. I tended to choose things that were slightly past, out of fashion, which would make it more distant,” he said.
He found his attitude mirrored that of French poet Jules Laforgue, and Caulfield illustrated an edition of Laforgue’s verse.
The poems ”have a kind of romantic optimism that is brought down to earth by a closing line. In the book I did, the first poem begins, ‘She floated along the avenue,’ and ends up, ‘It’s true, she was no one I knew.’ And that’s lovely — a situation that seems fraught with possibilities and they are all dismissed.”
His 1996 painting Happy Hour shows a light, a wine glass and an exit sign.
He started with the light, he was quoted as saying, ”without exactly knowing how I would end up”.
”But in the middle, there’s a glass, which I painted in my studio and you can actually see my figure reflected in it, but only vaguely, and then happy hour is a modern phenomenon, and I liked the idea of having the word ‘exit’, which suggested that the happy hour doesn’t last forever.”
Caulfield is survived by his wife as well as three sons from a previous marriage. — Sapa-AP