Using colour as a key means of expression, Michael Clarence creates playful, yet contemplative paintings that explore identity and experience of place. His fluid compositions encompass fields of pure pigment, dynamic mark-making and motifs that verge on the legible.

Paintings are firmly rooted in figuration as he draws from a broad range of subject matter including the domestic, religion, kitsch 1980’s television and history painting. Employing an experimental reductive process, he renders individual identities hidden. These figures dissolve into ambiguous abstract worlds that contain only suggestions of architecture and resist conventional perspective. Traces of underpainting, adjustments and negative space are instrumental in creating works that ‘chart their own visual history, together with a sense of nostalgic atmosphere’.

Clarence's personal history and experiences as a gay man directly inform his practice and are key to shaping a distinctly queer aesthetic. Paintings are scattered with recurring symbols and painterly devices: ‘shifting, transmutable forms that challenge cultural and formal differences and question the relationship between what we see and what we know’.