British Artists: Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield was a student at the Royal College of Art between 1960-63 alongside David Hockney and Allen Jones. His subject matter draws more from the masters of modern art such as Braque and Gris than from the consumer culture that preoccupied his fellow students. His work is characterised by a reductive, streamlined use of line and the depiction of banal, everyday objects saturated in colour. Caulfield consistently used screenprint for his graphic work following his introduction to the medium by Richard Hamilton and Chris Prater in 1964. The deceptive simplicity of his images, perfectly matched by the aesthetic capacities of the process, is clear throughout the various phases of his printmaking career. During his lifetime the Serpentine Gallery, the Hayward Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London all held major retrospectives of his paintings. More recently his prints were the subject of a survey at Tate Liverpool. Caulfield died in 2005 having made an indelible contribution to British painting and printmaking.