ART CITIES:Beijing-Shara Hughes
Working at the boundary between abstraction and representation, Shara Hughes’ approach blends memory, association and imagination to encourage new ways of exploring and presenting pictorial space. The artist describes the scenes created in her artworks as “imagined landscapes” rendered through hyper-saturated, hallucinatory colors and boldly abstract shapes. The artist creates familiar yet completely unique vistas of the natural world.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive
Shara Hughes’ first solo exhibition in Asia exhibition is presented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber as part of the Visiting Sector, a collaboration between Gallery Weekend Beijing and Zurich Art Weekend that aims to establish an artistic dialogue and cultural exchange between the Chinese and Swiss contemporary art scenes. Her new paintings further develop what she refers to as invented or psychological landscapes. These landscapes do not depict real places but rather are created from the inside; an inside that is strongly informed by a deep knowledge of art history, as well as the work of contemporary peers. Hughes usually starts the larger, more detailed paintings in a playful way – not by following a certain idea, but by employing a variety of techniques and styles to create a pictorial cosmos in which discontinuous parts complete and complement one another. The stark contrasts and myriad alternating styles do not let the eye rest and leave the viewer with a feeling of urgency, fastness, and even anxiety. In contrast to this, the smaller paintings create a quieter tension, letting the eye slow down. As if the process of painting was crystallized in the work itself, the decisions in these paintings were made at a much slower pace than those in the larger paintings. A recurrent motif in this exhibition is that of trees. In Hughes’ paintings, they are almost anthropomorphized, becoming figures. The central tree in “Tippy Tippy Toe” (2018) could be a figure creeping around at night, frozen in shock from encountering the viewer’s gaze. This tree is related in part to the central trunk in “Ole Reliable” (2018). They both feel raw, even aggressive, but in their own environments. Due to the different formats of the paintings, their urgency, and motifs, the viewer is ping-ponged back and forth. These invented landscapes create a cosmos through Hughes’ energetic and abounding painterly practice, which nonetheless is embedded in centuries of art history. In Hughes’ work, painting becomes a mode of wild utopian thinking, putting radical, paradoxical subjectivity at stake.
Info: Sheng Zhi Space, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang District, Beijing, Duration: 22/3-14/4/19
