283. Patrick Hughes - Library Shelves

Acrylic on Wood
17.5 x10.5 x 3cm
2026

Patrick Hughes held his first solo exhibition in 1961 at the Portal Gallery — the first one-person exhibition by what would later become known as a Pop Artist, though the term itself had not yet entered common use. In the years that followed, Hughes developed the groundbreaking reverse perspective works Infinity and Sticking-out Room, pioneering an approach that would become central to his practice.

During the 1970s Hughes became widely associated with his rainbow paintings, which achieved considerable popularity as prints and postcards. While many embraced them as decorative images, Hughes regarded the rainbow as something more profound — a solidified experience and an exploration of perception itself.

In the late 1980s Hughes returned to his investigations into perspective and reverspective, creating works that challenged conventional ideas of space, movement and visual certainty. His sculptural paintings exploit the tension between actual physical form and painted illusion, producing shifting visual experiences that appear simultaneously frozen and in motion.

For more than twenty-five years, Hughes’ three-dimensional reverspective paintings have been exhibited internationally and acquired by major public and private collections. Encountering a Patrick Hughes work in person is to experience a deliberate paradox: an illusion of movement and unstable space that unsettles perception and transforms the act of looking itself.