PRESENTATION:Shara Hughes-Right This Way

Shara Hughes, Collide, 2022, Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, Each canvas: 292.1 x 198.1 cm / 115 x 78 in, Overall: 292.1 x 396.2 cm / 115 x 156 in , Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva PresenhuberShara Hughes’ works are at once surreal and abstract, inviting and alarming, beautiful and scary. Their bold, clashing colours and shifting perspectives manifest into immersive and dream-like landscapes. Hughes’ “invented landscapes,” as she calls them, neither depict true-to-life landscapes nor the imagined. Though profoundly personal, her fantastical worlds are also open-ended, inviting us in as portals to our own experiences and psychological discovery.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsten Museum Archive

Shara Hughes’ solo exhibition “Right This Way” consists mainly of new works, including works on paper, as well as large-scale paintings inspired by the Nordic landscape and light. After a short residency in Skagen, Hughes also became drawn to the horizon line, where the sea touches the sky, and how it changes constantly throughout the day. She said, “(I do think)…there’s always something to learn about the passing of time and what that does to anything living, whether it’s mentally or physically”. Shara Hughes uses dizzying brushwork, vibrant colors, and shifting perspectives to make paintings that defy many of the existing conventions associated with the landscape genre. Natural motifs and patterned elements recur throughout Hughes’s pictures: snake-like trees, floating moons, distorted reflections in bodies of water, and stippled night skies appear in various permutations, synchronized with harder-to-define forms in which abstract and representational impulses co-exist in unorthodox harmony. Working intuitively, her colourful paintings do not depict places either real or imagined. The artist loosely gives form to floating moons, gnarled trees, and blazing sunlight, bridging the abstract and representational. The paintings make manifest a psychological complexity which, though profoundly personal, are open-ended enough to allow the viewer to project their own memories, bringing to life a world that is at once elegant and chaotic—infused with a vibrant harmony of the organic, the subjective, and the surreal. At human scale—the size of her own “wingspan”—many of the works are immersive, inviting and alarming, beautiful and scary.  Hughes’s process rarely involves reference images; instead, she transposes the psychological complexity of her interior world into lush and layered compositions. She often mixes pigment directly atop her surfaces, and in this way creates intuitive, one-of-a-kind color palettes that simultaneously point to art historical movements like color field painting and Post-Impressionism. As she engages with these open-ended experiments in image-making, Hughes depicts kaleidoscopic visions of flora and fauna in processes of constant evolution.

Photo: Shara Hughes, Collide, 2022, Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, Each canvas: 292.1 x 198.1 cm / 115 x 78 in, Overall: 292.1 x 396.2 cm / 115 x 156 in , Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Info: Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Kong Christians Allé 50, Aalborg, Denmark, Duration: 4/5-19/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-21:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://kunsten.dk/

Shara Hughes Growing Pains, 2022 Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 221 x 198.1 cm / 87 x 78 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Shara Hughes Growing Pains, 2022 Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 221 x 198.1 cm / 87 x 78 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

 

 

Shara Hughes, We're Still in The Weeds, 2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas 243.8 x 182.9 cm / 96 x 72 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Shara Hughes, We’re Still in The Weeds, 2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas 243.8 x 182.9 cm / 96 x 72 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

 

 

Shara Hughes, Healthy Support Systems, 2022, Oil, dye and acrylic on canvas, 243.8 x 182.9 cm / 96 x 72 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Shara Hughes, Healthy Support Systems, 2022, Oil, dye and acrylic on canvas, 243.8 x 182.9 cm / 96 x 72 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

 

 

Shara Hughes, Skagen Shores to Norway, 2022, Mixed media on paper 38.1 x 27.9 cm / 15 x 11 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Shara Hughes, Skagen Shores to Norway, 2022, Mixed media on paper 38.1 x 27.9 cm / 15 x 11 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

 

 

Shara Hughes, S Louisiana at Night , 2022 Mixed media on paper 38.1 x 27.9 cm / 15 x 11 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Shara Hughes, Louisiana at Night , 2022 Mixed media on paper 38.1 x 27.9 cm / 15 x 11 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

 

 

Shara Hughes, Broke, 2022, Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 182.9 x 167.6 cm / 72 x 66 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Shara Hughes, Broke, 2022, Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 182.9 x 167.6 cm / 72 x 66 in, Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, David Kordansky Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber