Toby Paterson RSA (Elect) is a visual artist born in Glasgow in 1974. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating from the former in 1995. Paterson won the 2002 Beck’s Futures Prize and received a Creative Scotland Award in 2006. He is the recipient of the 2025 RSA William Littlejohn Award.
The forms and ideas inherent in architecture inspire Paterson’s work, as does the experience of place. He has a particular interest in the post-war reinvention of cities under the influence of Modernism and is intrigued by what the cultural outcome of that influence has been.
Living and working in Glasgow, a city at the heart of the British experience of this phenomenon, his continuing engagement with such a perpetually changing context has informed his consideration of the spaces we inhabit. Paterson’s installations of painting and sculpture in galleries, museums and public space allude to existing sites, aestheticised approaches to the construction of architectural space and the social and political motivations responsible for creating the built environment.
