About the work

In this drawing diagrams are painted in gouache as laid out on the pages of The First Six Books of The Elements of Euclid, In Which Coloured Diagrams & Symbols are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners, published in 1847. These are overlaid onto a page from Picturesque Greece: Architecture, Landscape, Life of the People, published in 1922. This work is part of an ongoing series started from Liquid Library a residency and exhibition in Athens, 2014.

Date and country of birth

1979, GB

About the artist

Born 1979 London, Rowena Hughes lives and works in Athens and London. Graduated from BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths (2001); and MFA at the Slade (AHRC Studentship Award) (2011).

Hughes’s work encompasses drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture and an ongoing series of books that provide the titles and an illogical framework for the other works. Themes of looping, interweaving, layering, chance and irregular repetition connect these various forms. The works are often responding to a found object or image rather than the neutrality of a blank surface. Underlying this practice is a concern with the interplay between order (the systematic, intentional, scientific, geometric and controlled) and disorder (the accidental, intuitive, irrational, imaginative and uncontrolled) − the false opposition between reason and feeling.

Selected solo exhibitions include Sunlight Still Loops, The Eyes Sees, Arles (2020); Liquid Library, University Museum, Athens (2015); From the Slopes of the Curves, Galerie Renner Prinz, Vienna (2012); Soft Parallels, Roaming Room, London (2011); and Diamonds & Diagrams, Guestroom, London (2008). Selected group exhibitions include B, Belmacz, London (2019); In Quotes, East Gallery NUA, Norwich and Gerald Moore Gallery, London (2017-18); Every Line Tells its Own Story, Galerie Nathalie Halgand, Vienna (2017); Freshly Broken Surfaces, Galerie Pcp, Paris (2016); Text:Image, FotoGalerie Wien, Vienna (2015); In the Air Tonight, Galerie Gebr Lehmann, Berlin (2013); Spaceship Unbound, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2013); Back to the Future, Breese Little, London (2012); Wit, Fear & Sarcasm, FAS Contemporary, London (2011); and Rowena Hughes, Eddie Peake, Jean Charles de Quillacq, Rod Barton, London (2010).

Awards include AHRC Studentship Award for her MFA at the Slade (2011).