Visual Arts
Richard Dean Hughes: Under a Painted Ceiling
Under a Painted Ceiling is a towering, surreal sculpture that plays with properties of illusion and duality, the spectacular and the everyday, to produce a shared sense of the contemporary uncanny.
The sculpture is composed of a trompe l’oeil king-size bed, hand-carved in industrial, high-density polyurethane and coated in a layer of smooth epoxy resin, punctured through its centre by a monumental vertical steel tube with a ghostly mirror finish.
16 May – 20 September 2025
Free
Bold Tendencies Floors 7–10 Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park London, SE15 4ST
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For many of us, the site of our most personal lives – where we relax, are intimate, sick and lonely, and eventually where many of us will pass away – Under a Painted Ceiling draws on the prosaic form of the bed to create a tension between universal and individual experience. Made strange by its installation in a large public space, not only does the unmade bed evoke personal memories of time spent under the covers, but the thousands of invisible lives spread across the city’s horizon, all of us sleeping together in the ‘body’ of the metropolis.
Drawn to this shared yet private landscape, Under a Painted Ceilingalludes to domesticity, routine and ritual, instilling the repetition of our daily lives with a dreamlike reverence. Its polished spherical core, an echo of London’s gleaming, corporate facades as much as the historical landmarks of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey or Nelson’s Column – the surrounding bed finished in marbled shadows of smoke, cream and stone, with strokes of colour cast on its folds like reflections of stained glass on a church tomb.
Floating ambiguously between transcendence and the humdrum banality of everyday life, Under a Painted Ceiling creates an uneasy tension between feelings of distance and familiarity, object and image, harnessing the power of the surreal and uncanny to connect and subvert the boundaries between physical and psychological landscapes.
