#29 Doors of Knowledge

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Who made this sculpture?

Patrick Hughes lives and works in London. Widely recognized as one of the major painters of contemporary British art, he is also a designer, teacher and writer. He has been active in the British art scene since the early 1960’s and his three-dimensional “reverse perspective” works are represented in major public collections including the British Library and the Tate Gallery, London; the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; The Deutsche Bibliotheek, Frankfurt and the Denver Art Museum. Hughes has exhibited in London and throughout Europe, South East Asia, America and Canada. Books by Patrick Hughes include Vicious Circles and Infinity; Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures and More on Oxymoron. Perverspective, by John Slyce, is the most recent monograph published on the work of the artist.

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How was this sculpture made?

The immense work undertaken by Hughes consists of 24 wooden doors, each 7’ x 3’ bolted together to form a single zig-zag line and secured to the ground via concrete slabs. Original painted art work has been digitally enlarged and transferred onto the doors as a high-definition vinyl overlay. One side depicts a series of doors with distant landscape imagery, the other side a bank of bookshelves lines with images of real books. Due to the “reverse perspective” nature of the piece, the sculpture depends on physical interaction with the viewer. As a free standing piece, the ways in which viewers can approach and interact with the piece are infinite. Doors will swing open or shut, the landscape will be revealed or concealed, the book cases will appear to rotate in keeping with the viewer’s movements creating a hypnotic effect.  In an outdoor setting, painted and true landscapes will interact, while the detailed images of real books entice the viewer in for a closer look.

How does this work connect to artist’s other work?

Doors of Knowledge provides Vancouver residents and visitors to experience Patrick Hughes’s works on a scale never seen before. His work has enthralled British viewers for years, earning the artist a reputation of being one of the most inventive and unconventional artists working in the UK. His discovery and development of reverse perspective gave Hughes an even more potent mechanism for loosening the grip of experience on the viewer’s imagination. It relies on the fact that the human brain and eye are adapted during early childhood to apprehend space in terms of linear perspective – converging parallel lines imply recession and distant objects appear smaller. Reverse perspective exploits and simultaneously denies this learned response. The brain will persist in decoding the information in the customary way even though it knows the information is wrong. Hughes also uses painted cast shadow to underpin the illusion, creating convincing synthetic environments that ensnare the eye. Now Vancouver has the incredible opportunity to host a monumental work by Hughes during the Vancouver Biennale.