Shara Hughes is a kind of names that surged through the pandemic, when demand for her work spiked and costs climbed rapidly, culminating in her document sale of $2,940,000 at Christie’s in Might 2022. But curiosity in her work has not waned. Her lush, vibrant visions of nature proceed to strike a common chord, talking to the human situation and our connection to the world in ways in which transfer past market tendencies.
Her new physique of labor, unveiled in “Climate Report” at David Kordansky Gallery throughout Armory and New York artwork week, demonstrates Hughes’s painterly command and the existential weight her apply has taken on. Every of the 9 large-scale canvases on view unfolds as a dense world of thought and feeling, of self-reflection and experimentation, the outpouring of an artist confronting a pivotal second in each her life and her artistic path.
“Over the previous yr or so, I’ve simply turn into extra linked to myself, and that sort of progress occurs naturally as we become older,” Hughes says after we catch up after the festivals, reflecting on the numerous shifts in her life lately—her mother and father growing older, her marriage, her pals having kids—and the way these modifications inevitably form how she sees and makes work. “I’m entering into center age, and it seems like these sorts of issues have gotten extra actual,” she provides. Questions concerning the afterlife, concerning the fleeting and fragile nature of feelings and existence, floor in waves, not continually however with drive once they arrive. “Final summer time, I did lose somebody in my household, and despite the fact that we weren’t particularly shut, her loss of life jolted me into considering, what if that had been me? It pushed me into these non secular questions: what’s the afterlife, is it actually so scary?”
Whereas Hughes didn’t got down to make this present a meditation on existential themes, they inevitably form the works. Her method to the canvas stays instinctive, pushed by an intuitive response to what colours and gestures recommend. Brushstrokes construct layer by layer, forming compositions of vibrant tones and painterly currents that resist standard illustration, as a substitute settling into an unorthodox steadiness.
“The way in which I work is absolutely summary. Initially, I’d simply throw down a couple of colours after which reply to them, letting the portray information me greater than me directing it,” Hughes admits. “In that sense, it’s very intuitive and reactionary to each the canvas and myself,” she provides. “I’m not attempting for instance something particular; the portray exhibits me how I really feel.”
For that reason, Hughes typically describes her works as psychological and emotional landscapes: the progressive layering of paint and shifting colours mirrors the complexity of how we course of and elaborate the encompassing actuality by way of our senses. Her image-making follows and echoes the meaning-making course of all of us bear in “being-in-the-world,” one thing that precedes any linguistic or symbolic codification. “Usually I begin with out a clear objective, and the portray finally ends up instructing me—exhibiting me I’m fascinated by one thing or nonetheless upset about one thing agitating inside.”
Though these works might seem semi-abstract, they signify one thing very actual for Hughes—the truth of the psyche, and the intricate interaction of senses, feelings, and psychological, even pre-cognitive, expertise. “Each single factor I paint feels deeply linked to my very own expertise,” she clarifies. “I hate when individuals use the phrase ‘fantasy’ to explain my work as a result of these aren’t fantastical locations; they’re actual to me, a part of my lived expertise. They’re very a lot grounded in actuality.”
Hughes typically describes her works as autobiographical, although they’re much less about recounting occasions than translating moods and emotional atmospheres. “‘That is how I really feel about this occasion.’ It’s extra about filtering my emotions by way of the concept of panorama,” she explains.
Her recurring selection of landscapes and nature as websites to venture and replicate her emotions is tied to her upbringing in Atlanta, Georgia. “I wasn’t in wild nature daily—it was the town—however I lived on a lake, so I spent numerous time outdoor,” she recounts. “My household additionally had a tree farm about two hours south, and I’d go there typically with my brothers and pals. I did numerous tenting and backpacking, so I at all times felt a connection to nature.” Curiously, Hughes solely started portray landscapes after shifting to New York, maybe as a approach of eager for the plush environments that had lengthy formed her life and creativeness.
What instantly strikes viewers on this new physique of labor is its heightened luminosity, which expands the canvas into surrounding area with an auratic, nearly epiphanic presence that extends past the bodily floor. If Hughes’s work have at all times had the power to channel the very vitality of the panorama, this sequence feels animated by a deeper animistic spirituality, suggesting an intensified consciousness of the necessity to emotionally reattune with the environment and reconceive ourselves as a part of broader ecologies of interdependence and symbiotic relations.
Hughes remembers visiting Niagara Falls final summer time and being overwhelmed by the sheer drive of nature and the vitality of its primordial vitality. That very same sensation flows by way of these canvases, the place she seeks to seize the generative energy that art-making can unlock. Works comparable to The Good Mild (2025), The Rift (2025) and Niagara (2025) transpose onto canvas the relentless vitality of flowing water and the radiant vitality of daylight colliding with cascading drops that dissolve into air earlier than starting their cycle anew.
For Hughes, these work are much less concerning the afterlife than a few bigger present of vitality that surpasses us. “It’s the cycle of life, for certain, but in addition the drive behind it—one thing hopeful and thrilling we are able to lean on,” she displays. In Mama (2025), for instance, she sought to specific nature as a quilt or a hug—one thing secure and generative, a maternal presence, the timeless archetype of Mom Nature. “It might be a mound of flowers bigger than life, or a rock that transforms right into a determine you may go to for stability and even worship, like a Madonna determine,” she explains. “All of those components are a part of nature, but in addition a part of the psychological landscapes I’m at all times exploring.”
Hughes’s work humanize and personify nature, giving it the presence of characters. In Greater Particular person (2024), the interwoven visible discipline between foreground and background turns into the stage for a pressure between figuration and abstraction, between human and nature, which in the end coexist in a generative alternate of forces. “Usually I take advantage of bushes, vegetation and flowers to recommend a human presence, a self-portrait or perhaps a portrait of somebody. In that approach, the panorama imagery permits me to attach with everybody,” Hughes displays. Nature turns into, for her, a platform to ponder human existence past categorization and individuation, reaching as a substitute for universality. “A tree doesn’t have to be labeled as feminine or male or given a sure pores and skin shade or age. It turns into common.”
Different work, like Pearl Gate (2025), seem to inhabit a liminal area past each the sensory and human world, evoking an archetypal and magical dimension of panorama, one traditionally acknowledged and embraced by way of symbols and rituals, typically in opposition to anthropocentric, rational or scientific narratives.
On this sense, Hughes’s method to panorama echoes that of Romanticism, which handled nature not merely as a topic to be depicted however as a privileged area for probing the essence of the human situation in relation to immensity. For the Romantics, panorama was by no means mere surroundings however reasonably a stage on which to confront mortality, transcendence and the delicate limits of human energy in opposition to overwhelming pure forces. Hughes acknowledges this legacy, acknowledging that her work reply to the identical Romantic notion of the “elegant”: a imaginative and prescient of nature that provokes marvel and terror, awe and unease in equal measure.
Finally, whereas Hughes insists on grounding her works in sensorial and emotional human notion, these syntheses of shade, mild and pure components—supplied to the human eye but absent of the human topic—gesture towards more-than-human realms and past human time. They recommend alternative routes of feeling, perceiving and embracing the important entanglements of life varieties and cosmic phenomena on which our existence relies upon.
Hughes’s works exist in and are nourished by this liminal area, poised between the sensorial and the psychological, the earthly and the unearthly—a threshold solely shade and paint can traverse. “I feel I’m at all times contradicting myself within the work, and that’s essential,” Hughes says. “What does proceed to develop, although, is my connection to the work and my confidence in it, and possibly that comes by way of within the growth of approaches and what number of various kinds of portray are within the present.”
But these luminous landscapes additionally perform as portals between worlds, suggesting that the eager for transcendence might be happy by considering nature. In doing so, they invite us to just accept each the bounds and potentialities of our human place inside it whereas rediscovering nature’s non secular and energetic drive as soon as we reattune ourselves to its primordial powers of creation over destruction.
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