Patrick Caulfield CBE RA, British 1936-2005- Wall... Lot 40

Patrick Caulfield CBE RA, British 1936-2005- Wall Plate: Small Ridges, 1986; acrylic on board, signed, 81 x55cm(ARR) Provenance: Waddington Custot, London, where purchased by the present owner. Note: This work is by the seminal British painter and printmaker Patrick Caulfield. Caulfield was a student at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art, studying alongside Allen Jones and David Hockney. This piece is one of a number of studies in acrylic on board made by Caulfield for his ‘Wall Plates’ screenprints, made by the artist for Waddington Graphics in 1987 (M. Livingstone, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, Waddington Galleries, 2005, p.266). ‘Small Ridges’ is one of approximately a dozen of these studies made in two sizes (of which this piece is a smaller example), in which Caulfield played with the representation of light and shadow on a textured base. Therefore, whilst this painting was not one of the four designs eventually selected for his screenprint series, it is certainly very closely connected with this set of works, and is therefore a wonderful and unique example of the process and experimentation which led to their production. This painting is a key example of Caulfield’s instantly recognisable approach, which lies in the stripping back of scenes to their most basic, minimalist forms. Indeed, Caulfield’s Wall Plate pushes this idea to its extremity, resulting in an image which, at first glance, appears to have eschewed conventional representation for a purely abstract meditation on colour and shape. A study of this piece, however, does reveal it to be a depiction of the hanging plate referred to by its title. This was a subject to which Caulfield repeatedly returned in his paintings, with the plate’s suggestion of still life also hinting towards the influence of the Cubists - for whom the still life was a subject matter of choice - which loomed large over the artist’s work. Like artists such as Fernan