Patrick Hughes (artist)

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Patrick Hughes , actually Peter David Hughes (born October 20, 1939 in Birmingham ), is a British visual artist .

Live and act

Patrick Hughes: Vanishing Venice (2007)

Patrick Hughes grew up first in Hayes in Middlesex and later in Hull , where he completed his school days. His exam subject at Hull Grammar School was art. He then went to London, where he worked as a window dresser and salesman in a clothing store in the West End . In his free time, Hughes visited the nearby galleries and thus came into contact with works by René Magritte , Marcel Duchamp and Paul Klee , and he also got to know the contemporary art scene. He met his first wife, Rennie Paterson, then an art student in Reading . The couple, who soon had three sons, moved to live with Rennie's parents near Leeds .

From 1959 he studied at James Graham Day College in Leeds . After completing his studies, he worked as a teacher at the College of Art in Leeds . He later quit this activity to become a freelance artist. His earliest works were created in the 1950s. He had his first exhibition in 1961. Artistically, he is considered a forerunner of Op Art .

Hughes became known for an artistic technique that he developed himself and that he describes as reverse perspective or, for short, reverspective : paintings , collages and multiples , whose three-dimensional base is relief-like in the form of several truncated pyramids protrudes into the room, creating an optical illusion for the viewer . The parts of the image that appear farthest to the eye actually protrude from the image and are therefore closest to the viewer. If the distance to the picture is even greater, this impression is reversed. With this paradoxical technique, Hughes mostly creates surprising motifs of deserted buildings and various objects in the tradition of surreal art , such as the works of René Magritte , Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí in particular . Often are representations of stacks of books or bookshelves. The motifs of arcades and rows of houses are also based on well-known works from art history.

Hughes claims that he uses these unusual perspectives to deal with his traumatic experiences as a child, when he had to stay in a shack under the stairs during the Second World War until the bombing of the German Air Force was over. "I lay there and looked at the stairs from below as they ran in exactly the opposite direction when viewed from below," he said in January 2020 on the occasion of an exhibition on his 80th birthday in Cologne. The Reverspectives also illustrate a symptom that occurs in patients with schizophrenia . Their perception is so limited that they cannot recognize the picture puzzle with the change of perspective.

Hughes' works are often installed in public places , for example in the reception area of ​​the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main , in the British Library in London or in the Tate Gallery .

Patrick Hughes was married several times, the most recent marriage he was with the British historian Diane Atkinson . He has several children. He lives and works in London.

literature

  • Patrick Hughes: "geometry in motion". paintings and multiples by Patrick Hughes . Ed .: Thomas Weber. Galerie Boisserée, Cologne 2020, ISBN 978-3-938907-59-7 (English, German, illustrated book, exhibition catalog).
  • Patrick Hughes: Structure of space, paintings and multiples . Ed .: Thomas Weber. Galerie Boisserée, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-938907-34-4 (English, German).

Web links

Commons : Patrick Hughes (artist)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patrick Hughes: "Geometry in Motion". paintings and multiples by Patrick Hughes . Ed .: Thomas Weber. Galerie Boisserée , Cologne 2020, ISBN 978-3-938907-59-7 , chap. Patrick Hughes - Biography (English, German, digitized [PDF; 4.1 MB ; accessed on March 4, 2020] illustrated book, exhibition catalog).
  2. ↑ a b c d Heidrun Wirth: "The paradox in our reality" . In: Kölnische Rundschau . January 23, 2020, p. 19 .
  3. ↑ Werner Spies: Op Art - Kinetics - Light. Art in the Würth Collection from Josef Albers and Vasarely to Patrick Hughes . Ed .: Carmen Silvia Weber. Swiridoff, Künzelsau 2015, ISBN 978-3-89929-313-5 .
  4. ↑ Sarah Grant: Patrick Hughes . In: Art in Print . tape 2 , no. 5 , 2013, ISSN  2330-5606 , p. 23-24 , JSTOR : 43047111 .
personal data
SURNAME Hughes, Patrick
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hughes, Peter David (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British visual artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Birmingham