Collection: Richard Patterson

Richard Patterson (born 1963, Leatherhead) is a British painter whose work engages with the history of painting through the mediation of photography, scale and surface. Emerging from Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, Patterson developed a practice centred on the painted reproduction of found images — toy figurines, motocross riders, pin-ups — rendered at large scale with a technical precision that foregrounds the act of translation between one medium and another.

His paintings are not simply enlarged photographs but investigations into what happens to an image when it is remade by hand at a different scale and in a different material. The surface becomes a record of decisions — where to be faithful, where to deviate, where to allow the paint to assert its own logic against the photographic source.

Patterson has exhibited with Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London and has been included in major surveys of British art of the 1990s. Publications produced in connection with his exhibitions — catalogues and printed matter — document a practice that remains attentive to the gap between the image and its making.