Patrick Caulfield - Studies and Work

Studies and Work

Patrick Caulfield studied at the Chelsea School of Art from 1956 to 1960, and at the Royal College of Art from 1960 to 1963, where his fellow pupils included David Hockney and Allen Jones. He taught at Chelsea School of Art from 1963-71. In 1964, he exhibited at the New Generation show at London's Whitechapel Gallery, which resulted in him being associated with the pop art movement. However, this was a label which Caulfield was opposed to throughout his career, seeing himself rather as "a 'formal' artist", in his words.

From around the mid-1970s he began to incorporate more detailed, realistic elements into his work, After Lunch (1975) being one of the first examples. Still-life: Autumn Fashion (1978) contains a variety of different styles—some objects have heavy black outlines and flat colour, but a bowl of oysters is depicted more realistically, and other areas are executed with looser brushwork. Caulfield later returned to his earlier, more stripped-down style of painting.

Caulfield's paintings are figurative, often portraying a few simple objects in an interior. Typically, he used flat areas of simple colour surrounded by black outlines. Some of his works are dominated by a single hue.

In 1987, Caulfield was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 1996 he was made a CBE.

The estate of Patrick Caulfield is represented by Alan Cristea Gallery, London and Waddington Custot Galleries, London.

On 24 May 2004, a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including three by Caulfield. In September 2010 Caulfield and five other British artists including Howard Hodgkin, John Walker, Ian Stephenson, John Hoyland and R.B. Kitaj were included in an exhibition entitled The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, at the Yale Center for British Art. He died in London in 2005 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.