Size Sheet: 36.1 x 33.7 cm (14.2" x 13.3")
Medium Etching on wove.
Condition Excellent.
Inge Clayton FRSA (1942–2010) was an Austrian-born British artist working across painting, printmaking, sculpture and collage. Born in Salzburg, she arrived in London in the early 1960s — initially to work as an au pair — and made the city her permanent home. It was not long before art took hold: she enrolled at the Camden Arts Centre, where she studied life drawing, collage and printmaking, and went on to train under Jack Yates and John Nicholl, with further printmaking study under Peter Jaques at St Albans. She also worked for a period as an interior architect and jewellery designer.
Clayton is best known for her boldly figurative work — nudes, portraits and scenes charged with psychological tension and an unapologetic eroticism. Her European roots are palpable throughout: critics frequently placed her in the lineage of Schiele, Otto Dix, Kokoschka and George Grosz, though her figures tend to be warmer and more sensuous than those austere forebears. Writing in Art of England, Colin Andrews described her as producing work of "extraordinary seductive power and dark Berlinesque beauty," adding that she was "about as good as they get in describing form, attitude and expression with the simplest and deftest touch of the brush." Clayton herself was happy to acknowledge those Germanic and Viennese influences while pursuing a voice unmistakably her own.
In 1992, Dr Peter Marginter, the Austrian Cultural Attaché, noted at the opening of her Anna Mei Chadwick Gallery exhibition that her figures — sensual, sometimes sinister, sometimes comic — emerged from the same tradition as Schiele's nudes, yet struck a very different attitude: independent, free and self-possessed. That tension between vulnerability and power is a recurring current in her prints and paintings alike.
Over four decades Clayton exhibited widely in Britain and Europe. She showed regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Arts, and her group exhibition history spans the ICA London, Camden Arts Centre, Kunsthaus Schaller in Stuttgart, Galerie Mozart in Salzburg, Lumley Cazalet and the Alpine Gallery, among others. Her solo venues included the Boundary Gallery, Andrew Usiskin Gallery, St Jude's Gallery, Catto Gallery in Hampstead and several spaces in Austria and Germany. Works by Clayton are held in the collections of Keele University and the Marie Curie Foundation.
Size Sheet: 36.1 x 33.7 cm (14.2" x 13.3")
Medium Etching on wove.
Condition Excellent.
Inge Clayton FRSA (1942–2010) was an Austrian-born British artist working across painting, printmaking, sculpture and collage. Born in Salzburg, she arrived in London in the early 1960s — initially to work as an au pair — and made the city her permanent home. It was not long before art took hold: she enrolled at the Camden Arts Centre, where she studied life drawing, collage and printmaking, and went on to train under Jack Yates and John Nicholl, with further printmaking study under Peter Jaques at St Albans. She also worked for a period as an interior architect and jewellery designer.
Clayton is best known for her boldly figurative work — nudes, portraits and scenes charged with psychological tension and an unapologetic eroticism. Her European roots are palpable throughout: critics frequently placed her in the lineage of Schiele, Otto Dix, Kokoschka and George Grosz, though her figures tend to be warmer and more sensuous than those austere forebears. Writing in Art of England, Colin Andrews described her as producing work of "extraordinary seductive power and dark Berlinesque beauty," adding that she was "about as good as they get in describing form, attitude and expression with the simplest and deftest touch of the brush." Clayton herself was happy to acknowledge those Germanic and Viennese influences while pursuing a voice unmistakably her own.
In 1992, Dr Peter Marginter, the Austrian Cultural Attaché, noted at the opening of her Anna Mei Chadwick Gallery exhibition that her figures — sensual, sometimes sinister, sometimes comic — emerged from the same tradition as Schiele's nudes, yet struck a very different attitude: independent, free and self-possessed. That tension between vulnerability and power is a recurring current in her prints and paintings alike.
Over four decades Clayton exhibited widely in Britain and Europe. She showed regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Arts, and her group exhibition history spans the ICA London, Camden Arts Centre, Kunsthaus Schaller in Stuttgart, Galerie Mozart in Salzburg, Lumley Cazalet and the Alpine Gallery, among others. Her solo venues included the Boundary Gallery, Andrew Usiskin Gallery, St Jude's Gallery, Catto Gallery in Hampstead and several spaces in Austria and Germany. Works by Clayton are held in the collections of Keele University and the Marie Curie Foundation.