Ronnie Hughes WAS born in Belfast in 1965. He studied at the University of Ulster, receiving an MA in Fine Art in 1989. Hughes has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Ireland (most recently at the Millennium Court Arts Centre in April) and has participated in group exhibitions worldwide including the forthcoming ‘Pure Optic Ray’ at Fred Leipzig. His work is held in many public and corporate collections including both Irish Arts Councils and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Ronnie Hughes’ new work springs from a two-month sojourn at the Albers’ Foundation in Connecticut in 2006 and by a further visit to the Vermont Studio Center. The intensity of these two New England residencies enabled Hughes’ practice to germinate in previously unimagined directions, focusing specifically on the process of drawing. The measured intimacy and quiet ‘slowness’ of these New England works are important factors for the artist and stand in marked contrast to much other contemporary art practice. The ‘drawing’ emphasis has since moved across and become a major determinant in the evolutionary process of Hughes’ paintings.

Hughes is interested in networks of analysis, methodology and interpretation. He feels that these new works share with their geographical source of origin a connection to a certain ‘enlightenment’ sensibility – a desire to uncover an underlying order in the apparent chaos of nature. The works take the form of corrupted abstractions that investigate, and at times conflate, various dichotomies e.g. natural/synthetic, order/entropy, abstraction/mimesis, nature/nurture. Hughes sees his activity as constructing (or, possibly, ‘exposing’) order within closed evolutionary systems that each conform to their own improvised sets of rules or conditions.

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