In his hard-edged, color-blocked prints and paintings of innocuous interior scenes and domestic objects such as pots, Patrick Caulfield created a sense of the exotic from the ordinary. Caulfield emerged in the 1960s amid the rise of British pop artists. Early in the decade, he became interested in the flattened, authorless quality of commercial sign painting, which he adopted in his own work by eliminating any traces of brushwork. This interest in flat, anonymous imagery inspired the screen-printing practice that he pursued alongside his paintings. In both bodies of work, he employed the unnatural colors and sharp black lines characteristic of advertising to cast a curious eye on the inventions of the modern world. Caulfield was influenced by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, and exerted an influence on later British artists such as Gary Hume and Julian Opie.
