YCBA Collections Search

In the early 1960s, Patrick Caulfield rejected gestural painting for a more impersonal style influenced by commercial illustration. His carefully planned paintings were characterized by fields of flat color with objects defined by black outlines, calling to mind sign painting or comic strips. In the 1970s, Caulfield began incorporating other styles, including photorealism and trompe l’oeil, to create enigmatic, even disquieting, paintings that toy with the relationship between abstraction and representation, reality and perception. In Wine Bar, for instance, plant life and a salad appear at random while tabletops bathed in a sickly green light float mysteriously in midair. The word "Quiche" (phonetically close to "kitsch") appears to be written in chalk on a signboard, yet it’s actually painted in oil. Such playfulness with language by Caulfield also points to the influence of the surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967), who earlier challenged the putative boundaries between word and image. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020