Philip Hughes

Philip Hughes was born in London in 1936 and studied at Cambridge University. Self-taught as an artist, his vision has been shaped by extensive travel linked to a preoccupation with the structure of landscape and the archaeology of ancient cultures across six continents. In 1975 he spent a year in the Andean countries of South America and in Provence in Southern France. Over the past twenty-five years he has made working visits to Zanskar in the West Himalayas, and the sites of importance in aboriginal cultures throughout Australia, the pre-Columbian ceremonial from Cholula to Palenque and Monte Alban in Mexico and Tikal in Guatemala and a number of Anasazi sites in North America.

Philip Hughes has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1979 and has held ten one-man exhibitions there, besides participating in the Gallery's group projects from The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (1991) to The Piero Trail (1994). He has also exhibited regularly in France, including an exhibition in Paris devoted to his work in Australia over twelve years and in 1990 was given a retrospective by the Museum and Art Gallery, Inverness. In 1998/9 a major retrospective of his work over some thirty years toured public galleries in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. In 2000 he showed The Tin Route at the Tate Gallery St. Ives, the exhibition subsequently travelling to The Musée du Châtillonais, Châtillon sur Seine and the University of Lecce (Galleria Memmo, Lecce, Apulia). The Elysian Garden: a cycle of lithographs with associated paintings was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001.

From 1988 until to 1992 Hughes served as a Council Member of the Royal College of Art and from 1990 to 1996 he sat on the Board of The Design Museum. From 1996 until 1999 he served as Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, the first practising artist to hold this position.

Paintings by Philip Hughes feature in The Ridgeway, Europe's Oldest Road: paintings from the Francis Kyle Gallery with an essay by Richard Ingrams, published by Phaidon Press in 1988. In 1997 he created a cycle of lithographs to accompany Carmen Boullosa's epic poem The Elysian Garden, subsequently acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Patterns in the landscape: the notebooks of Philip Hughes with a forward by Glen Murcutt was published by Thames and Hudson in 1998. In 2003 Hughes collaborated again with Carmen Boullosa to produce lithographs for The Jump of the Manta Ray, a limited edition livre d'artiste, acquired by The British Library, The Library of Congress, Washington and other public collections. The British Museum purchased an original work by the artist for its Permanent Collection in 2003.

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