I was showing some art lovers from Cambridge around my collection the other day and made an unexpected discovery. Although I’ve never obeyed one basic rule of art collecting - concentrate! - my cumulative haphazard decisions have in fact established a clear pattern. I’d looked for, subconsciously more than consciously, artists, undervalued in relation to their talent, and all people whose work had very strong aesthetic qualities. Looking at the dozen key holdings, they are all figurative or representational - though I dearly love abstract art.
The fact is, though, that abstraction is generally speaking harder to sell than figurative work and therefore slower to rise. And there’s another common factor - a bias towards young artists (often having their first shows when first purchased), or towards older artists whose high reputations had been made earlier, but who for one reason or another were experiencing a less celebrated middle age. It takes guts to invest in an artist whose sales are less than they were or deserve; but never fear - if the quality is there, the artist will win through in the end.
Take the wonderful case of Patrick Hughes, see example left. A star of the British surrealist movement who had great success in the 60s, Patrick became most celebrated later on for the way he used rainbows in very clever visual puns. But when that vein was exhausted, there was a pause before it was followed by a new direction and new and greater triumph. Enter Hughes’ ‘reverse perspectives’, which are almost literally brainwaves: they exploit the mental workings of human vision to generate paradoxical images that ‘move’ as they excite the eye with their wit, colour and originality.
When you see these works, you’ll better understand why they deserve to be described as the only wholly original artistic innovation of our times. As I write, I’m looking at two examples - depictions of art galleries, one exhibiting works by the superb American abstractionist Mark Rothko, the other showing the Dutch artist Piet Mondiran, whose equally famous abstracts are geometric. Each ‘gallery’ includes two projecting walls, sticking out towards the viewer. But this is an illusion. The projecting walls are actually recesses. The brain, accustomed to the smallest object being furthest away, and vice versa, is baffled by this contradiction, and the slightest change in the physical relationship of the viewer to the picture produces dramatic movement in the ‘gallery’ images.
Words can’t describe fully this highly visual sensation, or the pleasure I get from these beautifully made and colourful works. Needless to say, they’ve sold in very large numbers - especially since Patrick developed the multiples, made in heavy card and boxed in PerspexSelling in editions of 45, these now cost £3,OOO until the edition runs out, when they leap to £10,000. My two ‘galleries’ were priced at £2,000 apiece, and now fetch £6,000 and £7,500 respectively in the resale market.
Compact size (typically 95cm wide, 45 high and 20 deep) makes the multiples easy to house. But they are based on wooden originals which are much larger - and highly desirable. Small wonder that Hughes originals are collected round the world at prices which run up to £35,000-40,000 - well worth it for great pieces which are great talking points. Have a look the latest originals in January, when they go on show at Flowers East, 82 Kingsland Road, London, E2. The show runs from 20th January to the 19th February 2006. For further information, please contact Cate Rickards at Flowers East on 020 7920 7777 or email cate[@]flowerseast.com (delete the square brackets).
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