Harry Zed Hughes is a contemporary painter working with figuration and abstraction. His paintings reference art history, especially romanticism and symbolism, along with allegorical paintings since the 16th century. Allegory has a connection to myth making, and Hughes uses this as a device to squeeze out conceptual underpinnings from figurative compositions.
Harry Zed Hughes creates mythological paintings in an age stripped of transcendental signifiers. In a consumer-based globalised world of individual choice there is now no singular universal metaphysics. Harry’s mostly large-scale paintings are filled with fluid symbology and open ambiguous spaces between painterly scenes of romanticism and science fiction. Symbols from mythology, literature and history, as well as formal elements, intertwine in a vortex of imaginative fantasy. A galaxy-soup of imagery is incorporated: Spheres - planetary and atomic; mountains and explosions; rings like Jupiter or halos; ‘Muscle spaghetti’; anthropomorphic spirits of every size and shape; tessellated geometry; to create a gaseous heated atmosphere of pressurised other-worldness. Hughes’ outer space is a world of our fantasy led inner psyche, a mythological state we have, in recent times, lost the map to.
Education
2021 Honours, Fine Art, VCA
2017 Bachelor Fine Art Painting, VCA
2014 Advanced Diploma of Visual Art at RMIT Carlton
2010 Bachelor Fine Art RMIT (Drawing) uncompleted (with a 3.5 GPA)
Individual shows
2021 There Is No Spoon, Polaris Gallery, South Yarra
2018 THE MACFARLANE FUND 2018, Stockroom Gallery, Kyneton
2017 Romantic Site, Seventh Gallery
Walpurgis Nebula, Red Gallery
Icecream Apococalypse, Little drop of Poison
Everything merges with the night, piccolo Meccanico
2015 Peripheral Luminosity, Balkon Art Incubator
February Studio Residency. 2015 First Site Gallery
2014 The Singularity, ArtLand in the Fringe Festival
Allegory Of Space, First Site gallery
Scroll, White Night
2013 Fabricate, ArtLand, and Fringe Festival
Lava flow , Gertrude St projection festival
2010 Pop-up exhibition, DuckMan Gallery, Gunma Prefecture, Japan.
Group Shows
2021 Every Artist Ever, Stockroom Gallery, Kyneton
2017 became; becoming; becomes, Gertrude Contemporary
2016 Winter 1706, abandoned building art show
Worlding, exhibited and curated, VCA Art Space
Dragonfly, House of Bricks
Proud, Margret Laurence
2015 Two Fields of Thought, VCA Art Space
Cosmic Inter-planetary Trans-existent Observation Tunnel Complex: Firstsite Gallery
Proud, Margret Laurence
2014 Only Human, exhibited and curated, First Site gallery
incidental , PS50 Gallery
2013 Time Mods, video: and archive, City of Melbourne
2009 Space, Rainbow Hotel
2008 RMIT Fine Art Drawing Art Auction, First Site gallery
2007 Three, Eltham Community Gallery
Awards
2017 Tolarno Hotel acquisitive art Award
Clyde and Co Art prize
2015 VCA Dora McRae Winter Intensive - Figure Painting Masterclass painting prize.
2014 Rmit adv dip grad show painting award.
Residencies
2018, The McFarland Fund . Kyneton Residency.
2015, February Studio Residency. First Site Gallery,
2010, DuckMan Gallery, Gunma Prefecture, Japan,