Biography
PATRICK HUGHES (b. 1939)
Born in Birmingham, England, Patrick Hughes is based in London, where he creates his celebrated reverspectives: three-dimensional paintings with the conventional perspectives of depth reversed to create an illusion of movement, challenging us to question what we think we see and experience. First exhibiting with Angela Flowers in London in 1970, Hughes has achieved international recognition for his lifelong exploration of pictorial space and paradox. Closely aligned with British Surrealism in the 1960s, Hughes is renowned for the impact of his work on investigations within the fields of visual perception and cognition. Hughes also produces two-dimensional works and prints, many with variations on the rainbow as a motif.
The genesis of Hughes's fascination with the concept of inversion can be traced to the artist's childhood during the Second World War. At his family home in the British town of Crewe, the safest place to hide from German bombs was in a cupboard under the stairwell, where Hughes spent hours looking up at the underside of the stairs - a geometry that would later inform his reverspectives. Iterations of this shape emerged in the structure of Hughes's reliefs, allowing the artist to reverse expected relationships of depth and perspective and place the furthest points of a composition physically closest to the viewer.
From the creation of his first reverspective work more than sixty years ago, Hughes has continued to confound audiences with his wall-based paintings and editioned works, applying his distinctive reversal of perspective to subjects that include mazes, arcades, libraries, galleries, boxes, cameras, doors, and landscapes, which are 'activated' into motion by the viewer's own movement. Immersive architectural scenes and constructed environments are depicted alongside familiar imagery drawn from art, literature and popular culture, as well as self-references. Landmarks from Venice recur throughout Hughes's oeuvre, providing a setting in which recession, reflection, and illusion become inseparable as the city's renowned buildings, waterways and shifting sightlines collapse distinctions between real and imagined space. Across each work, perception itself becomes the subject, inviting viewers to re-examine what is seen and what is known.
Exhibiting regularly across the globe, Hughes's works are featured in public collections including The British Library, London; Tate, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Denver Art Museum. Hughes was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of London's School of Advanced Study. Pioneering collaborative research between philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists has included experiments using Hughes's reverspective paintings in combination with an MRI scanner to determine the parts of the human brain which process spatial clues. Lectures by Patrick Hughes have been presented at the American Institute of Physics; the University of California, Berkeley; the State University of New Jersey; and the Byers Eye Institute, Stanford University, USA. Publications by Patrick Hughes include writings on perspective, verbal and visual paradox, and oxymoron.
