Charles Clough was born in Buffalo, New York, and became an active member of a local arts community that included Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Zwack. He studied at Pratt Institute, the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, State University of New York at Buffalo, and New York University. In 1974, he co-founded Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo along with Longo, Sherman, and other young visual artists. Later he moved to New York. His life’s mission, he said in 1976, was to produce a “photographic epic of a painter as a film or a ghost,” (PEPFOG) an ambition that was represented in the title of his 2007 autobiography, PEPFOG CLUFF. Clough’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the recent survey, The Pictures Generation, 1974 – 1984, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Referring to the period of time covered by the exhibition he says, “At that time, I was interested in deconstructing painting, basically. I did various things with painting and photography, combining them, gluing photos onto walls in installations where the photo revealed and the paint concealed. Gestural responses are crucial to my way of working.” In 2009, the year of Hallwalls’ thirty-fifth anniversary, he was the recipient of a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is currently based in Buffalo.
