Hanmi Gallery, Seoul is pleased to present ‘Patrick Hughes: Reading Paradox’ a solo show of the British artist Patrick Hughes (b. 1939) for the inaugural exhibition of the gallery’s Seoul space.

Patrick Hughes is best known for the creation of Reverspectives, or so called ‘sculptured paintings’, which combine painted surfaces onto a three-dimensional protruding structure. They deploy a quizzical strategy in which the furthest point of a painting, in reality is the nearest point to the viewer. This exhibition seeks to celebrate, and provide another ‘reading’ of the enigmatic, upside-down, inside-out universe of Hughes’ Reverspectives.

Hughes created his first Reverspective in 1964. Titled Sticking Out Room (1964), following his earlier investigations into perspective and perception that were largely executed on flat surfaces. Sticking Out Room depicted what looked like a view into a quintessential English interior. The room is divided by psychedelic floral wallpaper stylistic of the Sixties, miniature picture rail and skirting boards that accentuates the proportional perspective to give the illusion of depth and recession into the room. However, as the viewer soon moved closer into the work it became apparent that the ‘furthest’ point in the painting was in fact, the closest to the viewer. The viewer not only ‘sees’ this paradox but also experiences it.

Six years later, Sticking Out Room developed into a life-size installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London in the exhibition ‘Ten Sitting Rooms’. The second Sticking Out Room (1970) filled an entire gallery room, where the 23 foot by 8 foot fictive painted room of Hughes’ giant Reverspective merged into the real physical space of the gallery. It is a situation at odds, in which a painting that was pretending or imitating to be a real room truly becomes one – or inversely a real room turning into an illusion. For Hughes, ‘My sitting room contains another sitting room, but one you can’t sit in. You can enter it, but only with your eyes.’

Since then, Hughes dedicated the second half of his artistic career into focusing on Reverspectives. Like a Surrealist dream, Hughes’ Reverspectives have a recurrent subject matter with high art historical relevance. The city of Venice, art collection interiors and stacked books make frequent appearances. Fifty years since the creation of the first Patrick Hughes Reverspective, Hanmi Gallery is delighted to present a series of Reverspectives in Seoul.

Patrick Hughes was born in October 1939 in Birmingham, England. He is widely recognised as one the major painters of contemporary British art, he is also designer, teacher and writer. Hughes’ works are part of many international public and private collections including: Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Library, British Council, Deutsche Bank, Hanjin Shipping Co., Seoul, Woogin Group, Seoul, Goldman Sachs International and Wurth Museum, Germany.