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Biography
Born in London, studied at the Kingston School of Art, 1948-49, and the Royal College of Art, 1951-54. Early in his career he developed a vigorous style characterised by bold imagery, heavy impasto and hues of green, brown and orange. His subject matter was the common place, the clutter of everyday life. This brought him renown as a founding member of the Kitchen Sink movement in British art. Throughout the 1950s he exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery, won a number of scholarships, taught at the RCA and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, there winning the Guggenheim Award on two occasions. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1971. With the advent of Pop Art, Bratby slipped from fashion from the late '60s and into the '70s. A decade later his reputation began strongly to recover and in 1991 a retrospective was held at the National Portrait Gallery. During the last years of his life he sketched/painted a succession of provocative images of his second wife, Patti Prime -often in classical Italian surroundings - whom he met through an ad placed in Time Out. Bratby was and remains a controversial artist but he has had significant champions in the critic Julian Hartnoll and later the collector Charles Saatchi. The Tate Modern, Tate Britain, MOMA, New York and at junctures the Saatchi Gallery hold or have held examples of his work. |
