John Clark poetics
of space
Published in 2026 by The Stratford Gallery Ltd
62 High Street Broadway
Cotswolds
WR12 7DT
TheStratfordGallery.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be shared or reproduced without written permission of The Stratford Gallery Ltd.
Cover: Detail from The Descent, Oil on Linen, 76 x61 cm
Right: Machine Study, Oil on Linen, 45.5 x35.5 cm
John Clark poetics of space
14 March - 4 April 2026
Gallery Opening, 3pm 14 March, the artist will be in attendance
The Poetics of Space
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
The language of contemporary discourse is filled with elegant descriptions of societal fracture and collapse. The lexicon is vast and familiar, stretching back to Yeats and beyond: Fissure, rift, schism, fragmentation, gap, disruption, exhaustion. The words still fill the paragraphs of our cultural critics and political commentators alike like splinters.
Indeed, the efforts of artists since the first world war have usually been judged by the extent to which their work adequately incorporates this sense of fracture. Distortion, abstraction, incoherence became signals of the serious.
It’s what modernism was about and what post modernism was about and is what ‘whatever it is that we are now’ is about: attempts to make meaning out of the chaos and to do so by incorporating and even copying the chaos.
Unfortunately, and perhaps tragically, that very same fragmentation which art sought to reflect has brought with it the dismantling of the old hierarchies that made the messages of the great modernist artists available to us.
Those snobby gatekeepers, the critics and the connoisseurs have been vanquished. We are now liberated to like what we like but also sadly siloed, marooned by our appetites and estranged from those with different tastes. We like what we like but nobody knows anything.
It’s a predicament.
The work I make happens in this context and is buffeted by it. Sometimes it pulls this way sometimes that. Sometimes it reaches for the epic, sometimes for the domestic. The sea churns. My job, I think, is to keep the boat afloat by whatever means necessary.
The works gathered in this show explore different things
The Descent
Starting as an explicit response to Duchamps nude descending a staircase these pieces became much more personal and much more worried.
The Mysteries
Is the epic possible? I return to the question every now and then.
The Secret Album
That we record and measure is interesting. What we record is even more interesting. These pieces adopt something of Muybridge but measure and track something more intangible than motion.
John Clark March 2026.
The Descent
The Descent 2026
Oil on Linen, 76 x 71 cm
Model 2026
Oil on Canvas, 101 x 76 cm
Oil on Linen, 76 x 76 cm
Machine Study 2026
Oil on Linen, 45.5 x 35.5 cm
The
The Mysteries
The Mystery 2025
Oil on Canvas, 101.5 x 76 cm
Margin Study 2026
Oil on Canvas, 40.5 x 30.5 cm
Breath 2026
Oil on Linen on Panel, 30.5 x 25.5 cm
Once
2026
Oil on Canvas, 76 x 61 cm
Bad Summer 2026
Oil on Linen, 61 x 61 cm
Secret Album
Secret Album 2026
Oil on Linen on Panel
45.5 x 35.5 cm each panel
106.5 x 162.5 cm overall size
John Clark poetics
of space
price list
The Descent, £3,600
Model, £4,200
Machine, £3,600
Machine Study, £1,600
The Mystery, £4,200
Margin Study, £1,200
Breath, £950
Once, £3,300
Bad Summer, £2,900
Secret Album, £12,000
All paintings are available to purchase upon receipt of this catalogue. Please contact the gallery should you wish to purchase any of these new paintings.
art@thestratfordgallery.co.uk
+44(0)1386 335 229