Charles Clough
American, Born 1951
Charles Clough was born in Buffalo, New York. In 1969 he began his art studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, moving on to the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1973 he was introduced to another young Buffalo artist, Robert Longo, and together with a group of their peers they founded the Hallwalls Center, a gallery and studio space that still survives today. Commentary for a 2012 retrospective argued “that aspects of postmodern and contemporary art were seeded during this time, and that Buffalo ... provided fertile ground for these concepts and methodologies.” That retrospective exhibition took place at the Albright-Knox Gallery, the same place that the Vogels had come to Buffalo to see when they met Clough. Over the ensuing decades they collected at least six hundred of his works. He appears in every part of the 50x50 bequest. His association with Longo and Cindy Sherman led to his inclusion in the loose group of artists labeled ‘The Pictures Generation,’ though his painterly sensibility is distinct from their figuration and photography. In the early 1980s he swirled paint over reproductions of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Eventually the swirls became the works, the reference was subsumed, and his ‘Big Finger’ tool, a sponge on a stick, winked at Abstract Expressionism’s idealistic notions of closeness between artist and materials. “[O]ne's po- mo-ab-ex-post-impfauvish dreampix," he says. In 1982 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship. His work has appeared at the Brooklyn Museum, Albright-Knox, and the Leo Castelli Gallery.