The present work is the second from the Blue Computergram series to come up for sale at auction – the first recorded appearance on the secondary market was an eight-part work which sold at Bonhams in December 2020.

Each canvas, also individually titled Blue Computergram, was printed at Kelpra Studios by Chris Prater; each is considered a unique work. These ten canvases would have first been exhibited at RIBA as part of the monumental painting which gives its name to the series, a modular assemblage of forty canvases.

Several independent Blue Computergram artworks were made from these forty after their exhibition at RIBA: a painting comprising twenty-four of the forty canvases was bought by Olympus Optical as part of the scheme designed by Clarke for their European headquarters in Hamburg; and other groupings conceived by the artist as multi-part paintings, including these ten.A small number of additional works were also printed from the same screens.

New Paintings, Constructions and Prints, at RIBA,was Clarke’s first London show, and the first exhibition presented by art dealer Robert Fraser since the 1969 closure of his Duke Street gallery, which had been a key force in shaping the culture of the Swinging Sixties, and had introduced to the British public the works of including Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jean Dubuffet. Through the gallery’s 1980s incarnation, Fraser promoted the works of artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both of whom Clarke exhibited with in the mid-1980s, when canvases from this series were shown at the Robert Fraser Gallery on Cork Street.

Art historian and curator Martin Harrison writes in the 1981 monograph Brian Clarke:

“The [Blue Computergram] paintings are abutting assemblages of screen prints. They were printed on canvas by Chris Prater at Kelpra Studios. Each print is mounted from different corners, emphasising the underlying movement in the symbols. Each print was subsequently worked on by the artist so that each is in fact slightly different.”

We are grateful to the Artist’s Studio for their assistance with the catalogue note.