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Brian Clarke was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Ord Clarke, a coal miner, and Lilian Clarke (née Whitehead), a cotton spinner. Raised in a family familiar with spiritualism, his maternal grandmother a notable local medium, Clarke attended a Spiritualist Lyceum through his childhood. Growing up in an environment where the non-material world was considered to be naturally present and able to interact with the material, he was considered a ‘sensitive’ and gained a reputation locally as a 'boy medium'. In 1965, aged 12, he applied for a place as the last intake of an education scheme existing in the North of England to enable artistically promising children to leave their secondary school and become full-time art students, and was awarded a scholarship to the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts. In place of a standard curriculum, he principally studied the arts and design, learning drawing, heraldry, pictorial composition, colour theory, pigment mixing and calligraphy among other subjects. Considered a prodigy, by the age of 16 Clarke had mastered the orthodoxies of academic life drawing. In 1968 he and his family moved to Burnley and, too young at 15 to gain entrance to Burnley College of Art, he lied about his age and was accepted on the strength of his previous work.

Other projects include ecclesiastical commissions in churches, mosques and synagogues across Europe, the US and the Middle East (including the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue in Darmstadt, built on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, the Heidelberg Synagogue, and the Sinai Temple, Chicago; the screenprinted Yves-Klein blue glass exterior of ‘Le Grand Bleu’, the Hôtel du département des Bouches-du-Rhône, Marseilles (with Will Alsop); stage sets for Wayne Eagling's Dutch National Ballet tribute to Clarke's friend Rudolf Nureyev, and sets for an opera of The Crucible (Hexenjagd) directed by Hugh Hudson at Staatstheater Braunschweig; the stained glass and mosaic of Norte Shopping, Rio de Janeiro; the Spindles Shopping Mall, Oldham; the stained glass ceiling of the Victoria Quarter Arcade in Leeds, which replaced Buxton as the largest stained glass work in the world; windows for the 13th century Cistercian Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu, Romont, Switzerland; collaborations in stained glass and cyanotypes with photographer Linda McCartney; the cover of Terence Davies’ book Hallelujah Now, and EP and album covers for Paul McCartney, Jools Holland, Worldbackwards and EMI Classical.

In 2004, Clarke collaborated with Norman Foster on the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a landmark building in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, built to house the triennial Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. Initial designs incorporated a stained glass ramp throughout the pyramidical structure; completed in 2006, the transparent upper portion is clad in 9700 square feet of stained glass, which forms the pyramid’s apex.

Clarke's design of stained glass for the Great South Window of the grandstand at Royal Ascot Racecourse, as part of the £185 million 2004-2006 redevelopment funded by Allied Irish Bank and designed by Populous and Buro Happold, was to have been the world's largest work in the medium. The project received royal approval from Queen Elizabeth II, but problems arose during the redevelopment's construction that prevented the installation of the window, as redressing them would have necessitated a delay to reopening the racecourse, leading to the project being scrapped. Commissions for two roundel windows in Derby Cathedral (1976), and for the North Transept windows of Salisbury Cathedral (2014-2019), were not approved by the Church of England. Clarke worked on designs with Norman Foster for incorporating stained glass throughout Stansted Airport, and a glass tower for the Willis Faber and Dumas Building; Renzo Piano for a public sculpture for the Shard at London Bridge; Zaha Hadid on mosaic and stained glass for a building in Spittelau, Vienna, and KAPSARC, Saudi Arabia; with Will Alsop on mosaic and stained glass for Crossrail Paddington, and stained glass for Hungerford Bridge; and stained glass for Stratford International.

Major works include the five-story stained glass wall in the lobby of the Al Faisaliyah Center in Riyadh for the King Faisal Foundation, the largest stained glass work in the world between 2000 and 2017, and Stansted Airport; 21,528 sq ft of stained glass for the Royal Mosque at King Khalid International Airport); the mosaic and stained glass ceiling of Pfizer World Headquarters in New York, for which Clarke developed new techniques for the inclusion of two colours in a single sheet of opaque glass (in 1997), and a new stained glass facade (in 2001); stained glass, mosaic, ceramics, and turf-cut chalk drawing for Beaverbrook Coach House and Spa; the Stamford Cone in Connecticut; windows for Linköping Cathedral in Sweden; the Papal Chapel of the Apostolic Nunciature to Great Britain; the world's largest stage sets (for Paul McCartney's 1993 World Tour) and both the largest stained glass work in Great Britain and Europe, and the largest in the world.

Interior view of Clarke's Stamford Cone (1999), a 14m high stained glass sculpture for the headquarters of UBS

In 1998, Clarke and John Edwards donated the contents of the artist Francis Bacon's studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The studio at 7 Reece Mews had remained largely untouched since Bacon's death in 1992, and the decision was taken to preserve it for posterity. A team of archaeologists, art historians, conservators and curators moved the studio, wholesale, to Dublin. The locations of over 7,000 items were mapped, survey drawings made, the items packed and catalogued, and the studio was rebuilt, including the original doors, floor, walls and ceiling. In 2001 the relocated studio was opened to the public, with a fully comprehensive database, the first computerised record of the entire contents of an artist's studio.

Stained glass window by Clarke for the 12th century Cistercian Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu, Romont (1996)

Following the death of Clarke's friend Francis Bacon in 1992, in 1998 the English High Court severed all ties between Bacon's former gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, and his estate, and Clarke was appointed sole executor of the Estate of Francis Bacon by the High Court, on behalf of Bacon's heir John Edwards. Clarke transferred representation of Francis Bacon to the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, where a major show was mounted of 17 previously unseen Bacon paintings recovered from his studio. A court case was brought against Marlborough, Professor Brian Clarke (Executor of the Will of Francis Bacon) v Marlborough Fine Art (London), alleging that the Gallery had underpaid Bacon for his work, asserted undue influence over him, and failed to account for up to 33 of his paintings, but following John Edwards' diagnosis with lung cancer in 2002 the litigation was settled out of court, with each side paying its own costs. During the legal process an undisclosed number of Bacon's paintings were recovered from Marlborough, and "vast quantities of correspondence and documents relating to the life of the artist were handed over by the gallery".

In 1982, Clarke produced the cover painting for Paul McCartney's solo album Tug of War, designing the cover together with Linda McCartney. In 1983 the Tate acquired an edition of The Two Cultures and Fraser, a key figure of the Swinging Sixties who first brought to Europe the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, reopened his gallery on Cork Street in London with a show of Clarke's paintings and with the aid of funding from him. The opening night received significant press coverage, and public interest and celebrity attendance led to the opening party spilling out into the street, necessitating its closure by police cordon. Before its closure following Fraser's death in 1986, the gallery went on to exhibit and introduce to the British public the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ellsworth Kelly, both of whom Clarke exhibited with, and Keith Haring. In 1984, Clarke was commissioned to contribute to the refurbishment of Joseph Paxton's Thermal Baths on the Royal Crescent in Buxton; his scheme, designed in 1984 and completed in 1987, was for a barrel-vaulted stained glass canopy to enclose the Grade II-listed former baths, creating the Cavendish Arcade. Functioning as a local landmark, the work, which was the largest stained glass work in Britain until 1989, and remains Britain's largest stained glass window, is visible from the surrounding hills at night when it is lit internally. In 1988, architect Arata Isozaki approached Clarke to collaborate with him on the Lake Sagami Building in Yamanishi. Clarke designed a composition of stained glass for the central lantern and a series of interrelated skylights that internally referenced elements of Isozaki’s building and early designs, for which Isozaki in turn designed a lighting system that turned the work and building into a beacon at night.

In 1981, Clarke was invited to teach as a visiting artist at Pilchuck Glass School in Washington, with Patrick Reyntiens and Dale Chihuly, for the summer education programme. Clarke introduced all-day life-drawing classes, intensively teaching academic drawing from the life in place of glass painting techniques with the aim of opening up 'new ways of looking at glass design'. Later that year, receiving a commission from the Government of Saudi Arabia for the Royal Mosque of King Khalid International Airport, Clarke studied Islamic ornament at the Quran schools in Fez. A portfolio of screenprints, dedicated to his friend C. P. Snow called 'The Two Cultures' (after Lord Snow's influential 1959 Rede Lecture on the perceived gulf between the humanities and sciences of the same name) was published, and he became the first artist to have an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects, with a solo show of his paintings, constructions and prints. That year, the first monograph on his work, Brian Clarke by Martin Harrison, was published, and the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a large-scale stained glass triptych, executed by him in 1979, and an oil painting titled Trial and Error. The Royal Mosque, completed in 1982 and containing 2,000 square metres of stained glass, was considered to be the largest and technically most advanced stained glass project of the modern period, requiring the full staff of 4 stained glass factories and 150 craftsmen, taking a year to fabricate. Urged by his art dealer Robert Fraser to leave Britain to avoid the gossip columns and paparazzi, Clarke moved to live and work in Düsseldorf and Rome.

At the start of 1980, Clarke began to paint in oils again after a period of working primarily graphically and in acrylic, and created his first constructions, in wood and steel, and designs for furniture. Clarke accepted a proposal to design stage sets for Kraftwerk, and collaborated on unrealised projects with David Bailey, Brian Eno, and with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood as designer of the aborted zine Chicken, whose creation was funded by EMI and filmed by BBC's Arena. Noticing the similarity between the reticular, Constructivist-derived symbols that dominated his work and the light-metering computergrams from the Olympus OM System cameras, he produced a series of technology-related paintings including one titled Time Lag Zero for the headquarters of Olympus Optical (UK). Its unveiling at Langan's Brasserie by Patrick Lichfield for the fifth anniversary of Olympus UK was filmed by Granada Television as part of a documentary on Clarke and his work, released by ITV as Time Lag Zero: Impressions of Brian Clarke. Later that year, a major commission for paintings, a wooden construction, and a suite of stained glass windows for the Olympus European Headquarters Building in Hamburg was executed, for which Clarke was given 'complete freedom of the design of the entrance hall for the new building', and, starring in a series of adverts for Olympus and for Polaroid, he became a household name in the UK and the United States. The complexity of the stained glass designs for Hamburg necessitated the development of special diamond cutting and sandblasting techniques to accommodate the graphic, non-structural role of the lead in places, and marked the start of Clarke's manufacturing his windows in Germany rather than England, a major break with tradition.

In 1974 Clarke was awarded the Winston Churchill Memorial Travelling Fellowship to study medieval and contemporary stained glass in Italy, France and West Germany. That same year he received a commission for a suite of 20 windows for the Church of St Lawrence, Longridge, considered to be his first mature work, and in 1975 was awarded the Churchill Extension Fellowship to study art in architecture in the United States. Later in 1975 Clarke moved to Birchover, Derbyshire, renting a vicarage as home and studio from the local church authorities – he later designed and gifted a suite of windows to the parish church, St Michael and All Angels. A travelling exhibition of secular, autonomous stained glass panels inspired in part by Oriental landscape painting, Glass Art One, was shown at venues in Derbyshire and Lancashire, including Derby Cathedral and Manchester Cathedral. An internationally notable commission from the University of Nottingham to produce 45 paintings, vestments, and a series of stained glass windows for a multi-faith chapel in the Queen's Medical Centre followed, the process of which was filmed by the BBC as material for a documentary. The research from the two Churchill Trust Fellowships led to the Arts Council of Great Britain-funded exhibition of stained glass GLASS/LIGHT, co-curated by Clarke, British war artist John Piper and art historian Martin Harrison, with the collaboration of Marc Chagall, and produced the book Architectural Stained Glass. GLASS/LIGHT, part of the Festival of the City of London, was the most extensive exhibition of stained glass of the 20th century. In 1978, Clarke controversially appeared on the cover of the journal Architectural Review with a work titled Velarde is Not Mocked. Clarke had been commissioned to design and fabricate two windows for the notable 1930s Art Deco church of St Gabriel’s, Blackburn, by F. X Velarde, which was to be restored, and the windows were designed to complement and respond to the architecture, making reference to the elements of the original design. The building, considered one of the milestones in the development of English church architecture towards modernism, was changed significantly by the restoring architect and the interior and exterior elements were unsympathetically altered. Clarke's public attack on the treatment of the architecture by the restoring firm marked the end of his working in the church. In 1979 he undertook a polemical lecture tour of British universities on the subject of art and architecture, and was the subject of an hour-long BBC Omnibus documentary, Brian Clarke: The Story So Far, which followed a year in his life. Seen by millions of viewers, at a time when the UK had only 3 television channels, the programme received multiple complaints and propelled him into the public eye. Later in 1979, Clarke became a presenter on the BBC2 arts programme Mainstream, and the BBC Radio 4 programme Kaleidescope, conducting interviews with figures including Brassaï, Andy Warhol, and Elisabeth Lutyens, and giving Sheffield band The Human League, of whom he’d been an early supporter, their first television appearance.

Born to a working-class family in the north of England, and a full-time art student on scholarship at 13, Clarke came to prominence in the late 1970s as a painter and figure of the Punk movement and designer of ecclesiastical stained glass, and by the early 1980s had become a major figure in international contemporary art, the subject of several television documentaries and a café society regular known for his architectonic art, prolific output in various media, friendships with celebrities and key cultural figures, and polemical lectures and interviews.

In 1970 Clarke enrolled in the Architectural Stained Glass course at North Devon College of Art and Design, from which he graduated two years later with a first class distinction in their Diploma in Design. In 1971, aged 17, he received his first commission, for a series of windows in the Grade II* listed Southcott Barton, a 17th-century residential home, and the following year received his first ecclesiastical commission, for a memorial window in Preston Parish Church. In August 1972, he married his fellow art student Liz Finch, the daughter of a local vicar, opened a stained glass studio in Preston, and began to take on work including painting restoring, designing lamps, repairing damaged ecclesiastical glass, as well as working independently as a painter. This was followed by a commission for a new window for Coppull Church, Lancashire, in 1973, and further secular stained glass commissions, for which he painted, fired, leaded, assembled and installed the windows and panels himself, transporting them on a local bus. Further local ecclesiastical commissions followed.

Brian Clarke FRIBA FRSA (born 2 July 1953) is a British architectural artist, painter and printmaker, known for his large-scale stained glass and mosaic projects, abstract and symbolist canvases, and collaborations with major figures in Modern and contemporary architecture.