ART CITIES:Zurich-Shara Hughes

Shara Hughes is best known for her colorful, invented landscapes that reference multiple art movements, such as Symbolism, Fauvism, and Surrealism, and defy conventional depictions of light and space. Bright, vividly colored, and teeming with plant life, a sun presiding over the sky like some threatening planet, bringing to mind the menacing star in Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic “Melancholia”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

Shara Hughes presents her solo exhibition “Return of Light”. In the history of art, landscape as a genre has traditionally been dominated by men. Hughes, however, paints like those predecessors never existed. Though Hughes plays with the age-old clichés of wall calendars and Sunday painters (sunsets and flowers, forests and blossoms) her paintings do not add any ironic distance. Instead, her compositions somehow classically yet clandestinely turn landscapes into portraits of the soul, images blending light and shadow. Her colors’ intensity, which at first glance could suggest these paintings are altogether harmless, is deceptive. What grows and jostles here are metaphors for inner states that reveal more about ourselves than the landscapes, which, after all, are only imagined. By combining historical styles and familiar associations, Hughes takes landscape painting to a new level, creating immersive wholes in which pain and beauty merge. Going beyond kitsch and cliché, she plays with precisely those parameters and draws our gaze into the darkness behind fireballs and sunbeams, behind tree trunks, flower petals, and bodies of water, right into the apocalypse transpiring amidst this magnificent natural spectacle. “I work intuitively” Hughes has said about her process. “I don’t mix up palettes or lay anything out, so when I’m painting, I’m reacting to what I’ve just done. Working this way makes it exciting for me to paint because I never know what’s going to happen. I think that’s why my work seems alive and playful”. The paintings’ elements clash and clash again, never exactly fitting together, sometimes sharply contoured, other times almost collaged, so that the whole tends towards abstraction and at times radiates a hippie airbrush aesthetic: abstract brushstrokes encircle a waterfall; dark-colored dots transform into stormy skies; broad-contoured beams enfold a sun and clouds as if we were suddenly leafing through a picture book. It is unnerving moments such as these that reveal the stylistic range of Hughes’ painting—at the same time showing how this versatility helps her create compositions that completely cohere, moods that leave a mark. Hughes’ paintings have an air of the end of days. As alluring auguries of death, they capture our gaze and become symbols of a time in which landscapes are never harmless, the sun never just beautiful, and water never simply clean. What we see are scenarios that mirror our utmost desires and at the same time blot them out. There is something sinister in Hughes’ pictures, they sing like a seductive abyss. Whether we fall in or not remains unknown.

Photo: Shara Hughes, Sigh, 2020, Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 172.5 x 152.5 cm / 67 15/16 x 60 1/16 inche, © Shara Hughes. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber Zurich / New York

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zahnradstrasse 21, Maag Areal, Zürich, Switzerland, Duration: 29/5-22/7/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com