Sir Brian Clarke Hon FRIBA CF (2 July 1953 – 1 July 2025) was a British painter, architectural artist, designer and printmaker, known for his large-scale stained glass and mosaic projects, symbolist paintings, set designs, and collaborations with major figures in modern and contemporary architecture.

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

His practice in architectural and autonomous stained glass, often on a monumental scale, has led to successive innovation and invention in the development of the medium. This includes the creation of stained glass without lead and the subsequent pioneering of a 'dramatically enhanced Pointillism' in glass, as well as the creation of sculptural stained glass works, analogous to collage, made primarily or entirely of lead. The latter two advances are described as having taken stained glass as an art form to its zero-point in each direction: absolute transparency and complete opacity.

A lifelong exponent of the integration of art and architecture, his architectural collaborations include work with Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, Oscar Niemeyer, I. M. Pei, César Pelli, and Renzo Piano. He served a seven-year term as chairman of The Architecture Foundation and served on the Design Review Committee of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. His artistic collaborations have included work with David Bailey, Hugh Hudson, Malcolm McLaren, and with Linda McCartney and Paul McCartney.

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 was a notable local medium – Clarke attended a Spiritualist Lyceum throughout his childhood and was considered a 'sensitive', gaining a reputation locally as a 'boy medium'.

Aged 12, he applied for a place in 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.

In 1970, Clarke enrolled in the Architectural Stained Glass course at North Devon College of Art and Design, graduating from the Diploma in Design with a first class distinction. In 1974, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Travelling Fellowship to study religious art in Italy, France, and West Germany. He was inspired by the post-war German school of stained glass artists, and in particular the artist Johannes Schreiter. In 1976, Clarke received the Churchill Extension Fellowship to study art in architecture and contemporary painting in the United States, where he connected with the art of, and later befriended, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol.

Clarke died from cancer on 1 July 2025, one day before his 72nd birthday.