Artlyst Obituary | 7 July 2025: Sir Brian Clarke, whose restless experimentation and a driving ambition updated stained glass from an ecclesiastical craft into a powerful contemporary art form, has died aged 72. His death came just one day before what would have been his 73rd birthday.
Described early in his career as the “rock star of stained glass,” Clarke combined the theatricality of 1970s London with a deep and scholarly engagement with craft, architecture, and cultural memory. His death marks the end of a career that bridged the sacred and the secular, the monumental and the intimate, spanning more than five decades of restless innovation.
Born in Oldham in 1952, Brian Clarke’s early influences as an artist were marked by an acute sensitivity to tradition, coupled with an instinct to interrogate it. A Churchill Fellowship awarded in 1974 allowed him to travel through France, Germany, and Italy, where he immersed himself in the medieval and modern histories of stained glass. The experience proved catalytic. What began as a scholarly journey became a point of departure for a radical and lifelong rethinking of the medium.
By 1978, Clarke’s ambition had crystallised in GLASS/LIGHT, a seminal exhibition he co-curated with John Piper and Marc Chagall. The show challenged prevailing hierarchies in art, positioning stained glass not as decorative or devotional but as a site of contemporary expression. For Clarke, it was not enough to preserve the medium’s past—he sought to upend its future. GLASS/LIGHT announced its intention with rare clarity and set the tone for a career defined by risk, scale, and an unshakeable belief in the power of colour and light.
From the 1980s onward, Clarke’s projects grew in ambition and reach. Collaborations with architects including Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, and Will Alsop took him from the Royal Mosque at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh to Marseille’s Hôtel du département (Le Grand Bleu) to Stansted Airport’s chapel and the Queen Victoria Street Arcade in Leeds. His work absorbed and reinterpreted local vernaculars—be it Islamic tiling, Gothic tracery, or postmodernist abstraction—yet remained unmistakably his own.
Though best known for his architectural commissions, Clarke maintained a parallel practice as a painter and draughtsman. His large-scale “structural paintings,” first exhibited in Tokyo in 1987, informed his later glass work, particularly in projects where colour, light, and structure converged—such as the Lamina series (Gagosian, London, 2005) and Ardath (2023), exhibited at Brian Clarke: A Great Light at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery.
Among his most resonant commissions were those addressing spiritual and collective histories: the Neue Synagogue in Darmstadt (1988), the Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu in Switzerland (1996), and the Apostolic Nunciature in London (2010). For Sweden’s Linköping Cathedral, Clarke’s photographic reimagining of Christian motifs was carefully calibrated to preserve the integrity of the 19th-century glasswork—a testament to his sensitivity to place and time.
Clarke was also a great innovator. At the Pfizer headquarters in New York (1997), he adapted laboratory imagery into molten glass. At the Al-Faisaliah Centre in Riyadh (2000), he abandoned traditional leading altogether, using colour-dot matrices to construct form. Throughout his career, he refused to treat stained glass as a relic—it was, in his hands, a dynamic and living material.
He was knighted in the 2024 King’s New Year Honours for art services—the first stained-glass artist to receive such a distinction. He was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He played key roles in the estates of Francis Bacon and Zaha Hadid.
Tributes have poured in from across the art and architectural worlds. Sir Paul McCartney, a long-time friend and collaborator, recalled Clarke’s work on the Tug of War album art and his stained-glass projects with Linda McCartney. “Brian often had some great artistic endeavours to show or talk to us about,” McCartney wrote on Instagram. “We will all miss him, but have fond memories of him to cherish—and his incredible artwork to remind us of Brian himself.”
Oldham Council, too, issued a statement, noting with pride the three vast stained-glass roof lights Clarke created for the Spindles Shopping Centre—among the largest in Europe.
Sir Brian Clarke’s work is inscribed in glass and light across the globe. His practice insisted that stained glass was not a medium of nostalgia but of revelation—constantly changing with the sky, always alive to the present.
Top Photograph by Martin Booth of the artist Brian Clarke, Wili Media, Creative Commons