Richard Patterson

Timothy Taylor Gallery is proud to announce a new exhibition by Richard Patterson – the first in the UK to focus on the artist’s expanded practice, including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and film.

Patterson is from the YBA (Young British Art) generation of the late 1980s and 1990s that helped define the London contemporary art scene. As one of the few painters to emerge from the YBAs, Patterson’s technical brilliance – which he incorporates in hyper-real paintings that conflate European art history with popular culture – distinguishes him from his peers.

This exhibition presents new paintings that continue Patterson’s philosophical questioning of the connection between meaning, image and making, and are painstakingly constructed from a diverse range of painterly techniques and eclectic subject matter. Patterson employs a battery of techniques, genres and media: self-portraits, ready-mades, photography, painterly streaks and smudges, and virtuoso photorealist painting, which often converge at once in a single work. Alongside these ‘cut-up’ paintings, Patterson presents a new series of small abstract paintings that are unusual for their lack of figuration, but bear the hand of the artist through their palette.

Six Short Stories (2013) extends Patterson’s practice of ‘cut-up’ through the medium of video. The first video work by the artist to be shown in the UK, Six Short Stories takes the form of six vignettes compiled from found footage that includes: scenes from Black Narcissus and My Fair Lady, promotional videos for a luxury property development, an interview with Milan Kundera, a clip from Ken Russell’s 1969 adaptation of Women in Love, and early 1960s amateur footage of a motorcycle scramble at Hawkstone Park, England. Mirroring the artist’s approach to painting, where multiple image sources and painterly techniques are combined, the video presents a riotous medley of content and irony.

Fair Park Constructivist Pavilion Extension: Monument to the Celebration of Capitalist Ambivalence to the Destruction of Meaning in Art Embodied as Oversized Sculpture-Statues (Qatar/Dallas Export Version) (1999–2014) – a Renzo Piano inspired architectural scale model – houses six paint-daubed figures in each of its modernist rooms. These obscured toy soldiers – the subject of Patterson’s paintings work from the early 2000s – act as proxies for characters in the contemporary art world: the critic, the hedge fund collector, the dealer, the audience, the artist, and are presented as miniature sculptures in Patterson’s personal museum.

The same toy soldiers form the basis of a series of new photographs, the first of Patterson’s career. Depicted as grand cyphers, wavering between the monumental and the absurd, they simulate the same exaggerated-corporeal scale of his paintings from the late 1990s, with every swirl of paint and particle of dust rendered in magnified detail.

Born in the UK in 1963, Patterson graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1986. He was included in Damien Hirst’s renowned Freeze, Surrey Docks, London (1988), as well as Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997). Patterson has had solo exhibitions at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London; James Cohan Gallery, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; and most recently at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Richard Patterson currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas.

The artist will be in London for the exhibition opening and is available for interviews.