Contemporary art and a new decade of 21st century sculpture
Patrick Hill
Born in 1972 and based in Los Angeles, Patrick Hill's works combine hard, architectural materials such as stone, glass, metal or wood with soft, malleable elements like cloth, canvas or even clothing - often hand-dyed by the artist using natural fruit and vegetable juices.
In recent works, the formal oppositions that define his practice have become more subtle, consisting, for example, of starkly minimal forms conjoined with natural rock, slabs of patterned marble, or focussing specifically on the interplay between transparent and opaque surfaces.
Hill's work often invites suggestions of narrative, as in 'Sex and Violence' (2006) a construction of glass and wood draped with blackened canvas and livid purple cloth that takes on connotaions of bruising and bleeding.
Indeed, one of Hill's major strengths lies in the range of emotional nuance he is able to tease from compositions that unite disparate form into arrangements of perfectly poised, often unlikely, equilibrium.
Though ostensibly constrained by rigorous formal concerns, Hill's works are in a constant state of exploratory evolution: recent pieces, for example, include beautiful paintings/reliefs of concrete swathes tinted with his signature dyes (left), or vertical, branching structures that depart substantially from previous form.
One of the most accomplished new sculptors to emerge in recent years, Hill seems set to become an even more dominant figure within a new generation of 21st century sculptural practice.
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