Abstract #26 (Primary Title)
John Clem Clarke, American, 1937 - 2021 (Artist)
"Subject matter doesn’t concern me much. Visual code holds the lasting interest for me." —John Clem Clarke
Clarke’s witty fusion of Photorealism and Pop Art involved a dense process of photographs, projections, stenciling, airbrushing, and sponging. Interested in commercial printing processes, he created works that deliberately looked mechanically produced, covering the tracks of the artist’s hand.
For a series of works in a style he called “abstract realism,” Clarke reproduced fields of greatly enlarged brushstrokes—none actually made with a brush. The surfaces of his paintings drip with counterfeit expressionism, in ironic defiance of both hot abstraction of the 1950s and cool abstraction of the early ‘70s, when this work was made.
"Art of the Seventies," Walter Cecil Rawls Museum and Library, Courtland, VA, 15 Sept - 14 Oct 1982
Contemporary Art Acquisitions fr. Sydney and Frances Lewis VMFA, 16 Jan - 4 March 1979
Sweet Briar College exhibition, November - December 1976
"Art of the Seventies", Danville Mus. of Fine Arts and History, 25 Feb - 25 March 1982
Contemporary Selections fr. the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, 9 Oct - 30 November 1975
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