Patrick Hughes

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Patrick Hughes was born in Birmingham in 1939. His first exhibition was in 1961 and three years later he created his first ‘reverspective’ - an optical illusion on a 3-dimensional surface where the parts of the picture which seem farthest away are actually physically the nearest. Today he is one of the important and recognisable British artists of his generation.

Patrick has written and collated three books on visual and verbal rhetoric, ‘Vicious, Circles and Infinity: An Panoply of Paradoxes’; ‘Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures’; and ‘More on Oxymoron’ which investigates both verbal and visual oxymoron. John Slyce’s biography, ‘Patrick Hughes: reverspective’, was published in 2005.

His work is full of irony. By creating a world solidified into perspective he makes pictures that come alive before our eyes. In the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor makes a stone woman, whom Aphrodite brings to life as Galatea. Hughes makes wooden lumps of space and you bring them to life by looking at them. It is sculpted painting, solid space.

Patrick Hughes -CV