Richard Patterson
b. 1963, United Kingdom
English painter, born 1963
Richard Patterson's complex, multilayered paintings sit firmly within the grand traditions of European and American art, and employ a battery of techniques, genres and media. Often attracted by latent psychological or sexual charge, Patterson draws allusions from his personal archive and popular culture, which are then infused with material references to the academic history of painting. Claiming a process of 'masking', Patterson combines carefully rendered portraits with fenestrations of abstract painting as a means of generating a binary – and mutual – existence between the two contrasting languages of figuration and abstraction. Engaging with notions of fetish, these 'masks' literally anatomise the figure beneath, whilst conceptually acknowledging the inherent voyeurism of painting.