Patrick Hughes (British, b.1939)
My Retrospective

signed, titled and dated 'My Retrospective/Patrick Hughes 1992' (verso)
oil on board construction

Dimensions: 123.5 x 374 x 30.5 cm. (48 3/4 x 147 1/4 x 12 in.)

With Flowers Gallery, London, 1992, where purchased by the present owners

We are grateful to the artist for his assistance in cataloguing this lot

Patrick Hughes, one of Britain’s foremost exponents of optical illusion in contemporary art, has built a career exploring the uncertain boundaries between reality and perception. In 1964, he created his first, and now iconic, ‘reverspective’ work, Sticking Out Room, a revolutionary experiment in three-dimensional perspective painting that would later define his artistic legacy. For over two decades thereafter, Hughes turned his attention to other conceptual motifs, including his celebrated series of rainbow paintings, before returning in 1990 to develop and refine the reverspective form that has since become synonymous with his name.

The present work, My Retrospective (1992), marks an important point in that creative return. Here, Hughes constructs a complex, painted relief depicting what appears to be a minimalist gallery interior: pale walls, cool grey floors, and a suite of framed paintings hung with precise symmetry. Within each depicted frame, Hughes revisits familiar visual themes, architectural recession, surreal geometry, and vibrant chromatic contrasts, creating a “gallery within a gallery,” a witty and self-referential meditation on his own artistic journey.

In My Retrospective, perspective itself becomes the subject. Hughes reverses and solidifies the laws of spatial depiction, sculpting his canvases outward while painting them inward. The result is a visual paradox: as the viewer moves, the painted space seems to shift and ripple, the gallery appearing to turn and breathe. Stationary surfaces seem to move of their own accord, defying both logic and expectation. This dynamic illusion arises from Hughes’ unique manipulation of converging lines, light, and spatial cues, an interplay that exposes how perception, not physical form, defines our experience of space.

“What you see is not what you get. We think we live in a three-dimensional world, but what we see is a two-dimensional projection that our brains make sense of. My pictures play with that sense-making.” - Patrick Hughes

By transforming a static artwork into one that appears to move, Hughes challenges the viewer’s confidence in seeing. My Retrospective is not only a technical tour de force but also a philosophical reflection on the act of looking itself: an inquiry into how the mind constructs, distorts, and ultimately believes in what it perceives. In conjuring a gallery space that simultaneously invites and denies entry, Hughes creates a humorous yet profound commentary on art’s own illusions, those of representation, authorship, and truth.