Background

Patrick Hughes was born on October 20, 1939, in Birmingham, West Midlands, United Kingdom. He is a son of Peter Hughes, a commercial traveler, and Florence Hughes, a housewife.

Education

Patrick Hughes adored reading as a child. The books from a public library were the only way for him to flee from the unfriendly environment of Kingston upon Hull where his family relocated from Birmingham.

Beginning in 1950, Hughes studied 'O' level art at the Hull Grammar School (closed in 2015) under Ian D. H. Fothergill who encouraged the interest in modern art in his students. Hughes left school in 1956 and then moved to London.

Three years later, he entered the faculty of the English literature of the City of Leeds Training College with an intention to become a writer and a teacher of English. One of the teachers at college recommended him to pursue his studies at the art department run by Muriel Atkinson and John Jones at that time. Hughes graduated from the college in 1961.

Career

After leaving school at the age of seventeen, Patrick Hughes relocated to London where he found a job of a window dresser and salesman at Rubans de Paris (Milliner and Draper), not far from the Portal Gallery. In between the duties, he walked around the local galleries exploring the art of René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, and Paul Klee.

His own first solo show held at the Portal Gallery in 1961 brought Hughes the first acclaim with two-thirds purchased works of about forty presented.

In 1963, Hughes was giving lectures on art at Bradford School of Art (currently known as Bradford College), and then at Leeds College of Art (currently Leeds Arts University) the following year. It was during this time when he produced the first works where the illusion of perspective was key aspect. Infinity, Three Doors, The Space Ruler, and Sticking-out Room, his first reverspective canvas, were among them. Experimenting with optical illusions, he produced several works with vicious circles and the ouroboros. Hughes's interest in visual oxymorons and paradoxes manifested not only in the painting experiments. At the end of the 1960s, he, along with an artist and composer George Brecht, lectured on the topic in Exeter, London, and Leeds.

Sticking-out Room was used by Patrick Hughes for decorating one of the London's Institute of Contemporary Arts rooms that he worked on along with other nine fellows at the beginning of the new decade. In 1970, Hughes accepted Angela Flowers's collaboration offer and became the first artist in her newly founded art gallery. The cooperation lasted till 2018. In the first half of the 1970s, Patrick Hughes became extremely popular as the author of rainbow paintings. Considered as the symbols of joy, they were reproduced everywhere in the form of prints and postcards. Decoration for the majority, it embodied for Hughes the cumulation of different experiences in one concrete object.

In 1975, Hughes and George Brecht published their collaborative book Vicious Circles and Infinity, A Panoply of Paradoxes. That same year, Patrick Hughes established a studio in the St. Ives village, Cornwall and worked there for four subsequent years. He then relocated to the artists' colony in the Chelsea Hotel, New York City, where he began to work on his next book, More On Oxymoron. While in the Chelsea Hotel, Hughes got acquainted with the artists Keith Haring and Kenny Scharff, the musician Klaus Nomi, and the theatre director Charles Ludlum.

In order to multiply ideas on the motifs for his works, Patrick Hughes turned his attention to small watercolors in the early 1980s. The crucifix, skeletons, eggs, Yin and Yang, and shadows were his typical elements of the time. Coming back to oil canvases by the middle of the decade, the artist took another look at the concept of his early reverspective, Sticking-out Room, and began to expand it.

In 1987, Hughes relocated with his third wife to Hoxton, London, where he lives and works nowadays on his challenging imagination reverspectives. They have been exhibited worldwide, including London, New York City, Santa Monica, Seoul, Chicago, Munich, and Toronto.

Patrick Hughes has four books on the visual and verbal aspects of oxymoron and paradox to his credit. The latest publication on the topic, Paradoxymoron: Foolish Wisdom in Words and Pictures, dates to 2011. He has also contributed articles on art to such periodicals as the Observer, the Guardian, and ICA Magazine to name a few.

Achievements

• 

  Patrick Hughes is considered as the true illusionist of painting art and one of the greatest specialists in the questions of the visual and verbal oxymoron and paradoxes.
  
  During his sixty-year career, Hughes has created hundreds of 3D relief paintings that cheat human perception with the help of exclusive pyramidal geometry elaborated by himself. The number of Hughes's editions with screenprints and multiples reaches almost an equal quantity of exemplars.
  
  Nicholas Wade and Thomas Papathomas of Rutgers University's Laboratory of Vision Research has used Hughes' reverspective as the subject of their scientific research on the psychology of perception.
  
  Many of the optical illusions by Hughes are acquired by well-known art galleries and venues, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, Tate London, The British Academy London, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt, Germany, among others.
  
  Hughes, in collaboration with George Brecht, created the first book on the paradox in the world, Vicious Circles and Infinity, A Panoply of Paradoxes, published on Japanese, German, Dutch and Spanish. There are around 100,000 sold items of the volume.
  
  Patrick Hughes is a Citizen of the World.
  
  In 2015, For the Venice Biennale by Patrick Hughes was purchased for $149,405 at Christie’s in South Kensington.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Silver

  • Great Wall

  • Robot

  • Loving

  • Remarkable

  • Turner

  • Mondrians

• painting

  • Moving

  • Surreal

  • Handy

  • Moonshine

  • Cloudy

  • Travel

  • Grand Tetons

  • Unstable

  • Toy Story

  • House of Cards

  • Artist's Books

  • A Palazzo in Venice

  • We Are All Surrealists Now

  • Crate Expectations

  • Banksee

  • Riflessi Sulla Laguna

  • Studiolo Study

  • Carnevale

Views

Quotations: "For the first thirty years of my career I was saying paradox is the thing, I was pushing a paradoxical kind of art, with contradictory images like the ouroboros and the solid rainbow, but when I started making a paradoxical and contradictory perspective, a reverse perspective, then I was no longer telling my viewers things but allowing them to experience contradictory perceptions and so letting the art watcher find out the magic for themselves."

"When the principles of perspective are reversed and solidified into sculpted paintings something extraordinary happens; the mind is deceived into believing the impossible, that a static painting can move of its own accord."

"In my reverspective, you have a contradictory and paradoxical experience. I wouldn't think they're beautiful. I think... they can be awe-inspiring."

"A book is a way out. They are little doors – you open the hinged rectangle of the book and step into another world. I escaped from my suburban hell-hole of an upbringing through the book."

"I can see now from the perspective of sixty years making art that in the first half of my career I was interested in showing people the paradox of life, but in the second half, with my reverspective three-dimensional paintings, I let people experience this paradox for themselves (just as a good teacher should). Another way of looking at the career is that my early work was poetic and my later work prosaic."

"Art openings are awful, they are cocktail parties, with a memory test for the artist of the names of the partners of acquaintances. Before the show is anxiety. After the show is depression."

Interests

• reading

• Writers

  Franz Kafka, Eugène Ionesco

• Artists

  M.C. Escher, René Magritte

Connections

Patrick Hughes married Rennie Paterson at the end of the 1950s. The family produced three children named John, James, and Solomon. Hughes and Paterson divorced in 1970. A year later, the artist married an artist and writer Molly Parkin. They lived together till 1981.

In 1987, Hughes married a historian and author Diane Atkinson.

Father:

Peter Hughes

Mother:

Florence Hughes

ex-wife:

Rennie Paterson

ex-wife:

Molly Parkin

Wife:

Diane Atkinson

Son:

John Hughes

Son:

James Hughes

Son:

Solomon Hughes

colleague:

Anthony Earnshaw

colleague:

George Brecht

References

• Patrick Hughes Official Website
• Patrick Hughes: Perverspective An entertaining and intelligent account of Patrick Hughes' formation and the implications of his paradoxical art.
  2011
• Paradoxymoron: Foolish Wisdom in Words and Pictures A brilliant, comprehensive and unorthodox text-book of words and pictures from many periods and places, this book is a warm tribute to Patrick Hughes rather than a cold rebuke to the contradiction in terms.
  2011
• A New Perspective
  2014