Hugh Scott-Douglas UK, b. 1988

Hugh Scott-Douglas is perhaps best known today for his abstract, pattern-rich panels and installations. He uses a wide variety of techniques—from photography, laser cutting, to inkjet printing—that take as their subject and visual language various methods and networks of production and transaction. Across his practice, Scott-Douglas investigates the possibilities and limitations of the production of the photographic image at a turning point in the medium’s history, as it makes the conversion from modes of mechanical reproduction towards digital technologies. This series Natural History is a group of printed paintings originating from digital photographs of the peripheries of the wildlife dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. Instead of exposing the realities of the ocean, the museum’s staged plastic environment promotes an idealized and fixed ecosystem, which exists outside of the perilous realms of human influence. Appropriating the protocols of the capitalist treatment of images, he captures and processes these pseudo-worlds with a succession of artificial intermediaries.

Hugh Scott-Douglas received B.F.A in Sculpture from Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto and studied at Pratt Institute, New York. He has held solo exhibitions including Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Tochigi (2016) and has participated in group exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2016); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden (2016); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2016); Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015), Rennie Museum, Vancouver (2015); Worcester Art Museum, Worcester (2016) and etc. His works are in the collections of SFMoMA, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, USA; Dallas Museum of Art, USA; Colby Museum of Art, USA; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, USA; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Odermatt Collection, Canada, Sammlung Goetz, Germany and Pinault Collection, Italy.