Manuel Hughes has focused on painting household objects for over 30 years. He has been active in the art scene since the early seventies. His focus is on the details of the objects and also on the formal relationships between the pieces in each arrangement. From boxes, antique cans to draped fabrics, instruments, and toys, his uncomplicated portrayal of mundane and ordinary items set against an ordinary background invites the viewer to share in the pleasure he takes in each unique and quirky form. He graduated with a Bachelor’s and a Master’s of Fine Arts from the University of Missouri. His most recent endeavors, “Arkansas Memories” incorporate memories of his childhood. They are a series of still life paintings with historical African-American objects representing the disturbing, sometimes vast, often gorgeous images of both present and past life as an African-American man in America.
His work is represented in New York by O.K. Harris and Hubert Gallery and in Ohio by Hammond Harkins Gallery. His paintings are in the collections of the City Art Museum of St. Louis, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the High Museum, the Everson Museum, the Newark Museum, the Whitney Museum of American, and in several other museums. The artist splits his time between Paris, France and New York City, looking for thrift shops and antique stores in search of toys, tins and old crates to use as subjects of his highly detailed and colorful still lifes. Within the composition on canvas, Hughes plays with the formal relationships and with the humorous subtext created through the arrangement of the elements.
