Patrick Hughes

Patrick Hughes' pictures are hard to describe, but easy to enjoy. Hughes makes moving pictures. His libraries, skyscrapers and mazes seem to turn around and follow you like the eyes in portraits are said to do. Flat on the page they don't 'work', but when animated by the motion and mind of the viewer his pictures spring to life. For well over thirty years, Hughes has captured the hearts and perceptual thoughts of an expanding public with his art. In this book, the first to handle the entirety of Hughes' production from the early 1960s to the present, the writer and critic John Slyce gives an entertaining and intelligent account of the artist's formation and the implications of his paradoxical art. Originally published in 1998, this new edition includes an afterword from the author, the essay The Man on the Flying Trapezium written by Patrick Hughes, and more than thirty new examples of Hughes' captivating three-dimensional art.