Michael Clark

Michael Clark (born 1 April 1954) is a contemporary British artist. His work spans a broad range of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, installation, video, performance and artist's books. Clark was born in Manchester and lives and works in London. Life and work In 1977 Clark met Muriel Belcher and Francis Bacon in The Colony Room club in Soho. Clark's portrait of Belcher on her deathbed (Muriel Belcher Ill in bed) was part of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1981, and won the Charles Wollaston Award. At the suggestion of Valerie Beston, of Marlborough Fine Art, Clark made the first of a series of portraits of Bacon, one of which is in the British Museum's collection. "Michael Clark's portraits of Bacon emphasise the sad preoccupation of his sagging face, with eyes deep in concussed hollows grimly contemplating mortality". Vanitas (1990-1992), Clark's double-sided portrait of Lisa Stansfield, was part of The Portrait Now exhibition held from 1993–1994 at the National Portrait Gallery. "Both the theme of the wound and the title 'Vanitas' make references to mortality. Clark was partly inspired by a Renaissance painting — also double-sided — by Barthel Bruyn the Elder." Since 1994, Clark's Five Wounds have been on permanent display at Chichester Cathedral, alongside works by Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Marc Chagall."In some the glaze is so heavy that their raised and gleaming beads of crimson appear to flow. In others pieces of yellow 'bone' seem to rise beneath the skin. Any initial revulsion soon gives way to enchantment. [...] In the Wounds the viewer comes face to face with the very real nature of Christ's suffering and consequently with our own mortality. 'These works are forms to meditate upon' explains the artist. 'A trigger-release mechanism; a way of opening up.'"Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate, listed Clark's portrait of filmmaker Derek Jarman, The Gardener (1994), as one of her favourite works in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery. “Michael Clark drew the film-maker towards the end of his life, when he was a man facing sickness and death. The drawing has a distinct and immediate impact, foregrounding as it does the quality of personal courage of the sitter.