Scott Richards Contemporary Art is delighted to announce The Illusion of Space, the upcoming solo exhibition of optical, three-dimensional artworks by acclaimed British artist, Patrick Hughes.
Meet the artist at the opening reception on Saturday, October 3, 4 – 6 pm and experience the confounding effects of his three-dimensional, reverse perspective artworks. The exhibition continues through November 14st.
Patrick Hughes is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking approach to visual perception, known as reverse perspective, or Reverspective. Through this distinctive artistic process, Hughes transforms the conventional relationship between the viewer and the painted image into an unforgettable experience. His sculptural compositions appear to shift along with our movements, producing an extraordinary perceived sense of depth, motion, and dimensionality. What initially appears to be a solid, static form becomes an engaging optical experience that continually questions how we see and interpret space.
Among the many highlights on view at Scott Richards Contemporary Art, Across the Bay stands as Hughes’ distinctive tribute to San Francisco. This large-scale oil-on-board construction features the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges framing a vignette of the city’s quintessential landscape, set within the intricate interior of an art collector’s apartment, where art books and treasured objects are displayed alongside works by leading figures in contemporary art, including Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, and Wayne Thiebaud, along with a cameo appearance by one of Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted sculptures.
The exhibition includes many new variations of Hughes’ Solid Hollows series, furthering his investigation of perspective and perception. Painted in reverse perspective on perpendicular wooden panels, these complex, three-dimensional works create a false sense of volume and appear to shift and rotate with the viewer’s movements. Recent paintings include the book-stack illusions Magrittesque, SF-MOMA and NYC-MOMA, as well as The Rule of Five, in which five solid-hollow elements interact to create an ever-changing relationship between object, surface, and space.
The Illusion of Space offers an engaging look at Hughes’ ongoing fascination with the mechanics of seeing. By turning perspective into something physical and dynamic, the exhibition invites viewers to experience firsthand the shifting boundary between what is logically real and what is created through perception. The collection of new works at Scott Richards Contemporary Art demonstrates the artist’s continued ability to reinvent the possibilities of painting while maintaining a distinctive place within contemporary art.
The world-renowned British artist lives in London and has also written numerous books on visual and verbal rhetoric. Hughes’ paintings have earned international acclaim as part of exhibitions in the United Kingdom, United States, Europe, Korea, and Canada; they are also included in prestigious museum collections, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Wurth Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Detroit Institute of Art among others.
Join us for the Opening Reception with Patrick Hughes on October 3, 2026, from 4:00 – 6:00 PM.
For further information and press inquiries, please contact: Alina Richards, alina@srcart.com, 415-205-4197
Check gallery website for hours and additional info
