(British, b. 1938)
Biography
Paul Huxley’s latest prints, ‘Hong (red)’, ‘Huang (yellow)’ and ‘Lang (blue)’ derive from an invitation he accepted from The Red Mansion Foundation to make a trip to China with the view to develop a body of work based on his experiences there. Creatively responding to urban communications there - public notices, street signs and advertising - Huxley found that he viewed the striking Chinese characters not just as message carriers but as abstract form and pattern, which relates to the human stature and human gesture in his previous work. Huxley based the screen prints on the three colours red, yellow and blue - one of the tenets of western modernist painting, which comes out of Mondrian and the de Stijl group. Ironically, classical Chinese painting is always made simply with black ink on white paper.
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Paul Huxley graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 1960. He has shown nationally and internationally including solo shows at Rhodes and Mann, London, and group shows including ‘Metamorphosis - the Changing Face of British Art’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, Greece. He has taken part in numerous exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London, the most recent being ‘Royal Academicians in China’ in early 2006. As well as showing his own work at the Royal Academy, Huxley has co-curated other exhibitions and was professor of painting at the RA until 1998 where he taught the likes of Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili and Dinos Chapman. Huxley has completed many commissions, one of which was for London Transport at Kings Cross Station. His work exists in many collections across the world. Huxley was born in London, where he still lives and works.