Patrick Loughran
USA
b. 1948
‘Parallel to my practice of drawing, my sculptures represent a search for forms and images that I have never seen, which are the result of gestures, erasures, repetitions, superpositions and observations of unforeseen effects. All traces of this quest interest me. I try to leave them apparent once the work is finished.’
Originally from Detroit, Patrick Loughran graduated in Political Science and Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York City. Having taught ceramics at art schools in New York, Chicago and New Mexico, he moved to France in 1991 where he now lives and works.
The assembly of his clay sculptures respects a logic of mechanical improvisation as well as the natural biological and geological laws that regulate the way things grow and develop. His objects represent a search for forms and images, which the artist has never seen.
He views ceramics as a distillation of several modes of expression in which painting and sculpture merge, while colour also plays an important role. Patrick Loughran’s most recent work sees an almost unconscious idea of bringing together a rigid and soft structure at the same time: a kind of erotic architecture.