Richard Patterson Paintings 12 September – 18 October 1997         Since graduating from Goldsmith's in 1986, and showing in the exhibition Freeze in 1988, Richard Patterson's work has been included in ACE! the touring exhibition of the Arts Council Collection and About Vision, the exhibition of New British Painting at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art. In 1995 Motocrosser was shown at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. Patterson's first solo exhibition will show a major body of work produced since 1995 and co-incides with Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Art, in which Patterson is represented by four more major paintings. Patterson often works in series. Like Johns or Monet he uses repetition to stabilise the work's content while exploring variations in treatment. The Motocrossers, perhaps Patterson's best known images, first heralded this pattern of working. To date he has made three of these monumental bikers, and a fourth is planned. More recently a small toy Minotaur has become the subject of such a series. Like the Motocrosser, when scaled up in paint, the model reverts to the powerful, sinister figure of its origins. The inaccuracies and marks of its molding are magnified to become anatomical features or scars, and leave us ambivalent about the figure's status in reality. The minotaurs are placed against backgrounds of intense colour or survey vivid landscapes, post-Modern homages to colourfield painting. The painting's subject becomes a ground for the representation of a brushstroke or a field of colour, and at this critical point Patterson's work throws into confusion a notional distinction between abstraction and figuration. In this dissolution of the distinction between figure and ground, Patterson makes reference to Lichtenstein. It is a reference that becomes particularly potent in his compositions of interiors, the most recent of which will be shown in the Royal Academy's Sensation show. Here elements which represent every level of the artist's illusionistic syntax are grouped together. By a complex conceit of process, arrangements of studio furniture and objects, fragments of Patterson's early abstract paintings, meticulously copied and scaled-up paintings of brushstrokes are all unified in a single composition. In Patterson's most recent series of paintings, commercial images and 'surprise stars' from pop culture meet on canvas, a parodic reversal of the plundering of fine art by advertising and the media. Patterson uses the strategies of the carnival and the grotesque to re-eroticise the sanitised icons of popular culture. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with colour reproductions of all Patterson's major works to date, notes from interviews with the artist and a text by Stuart Morgan.