Executed in 2010, You Are My Sunshine is situated at the height of Hughes’s exploration of interior spaces, a primary focus of the artist’s early oeuvre. In the present work, Hughes vacillates between the interior and exterior – situated in a liminal space that is neither entirely inside nor outside, the dock stretches out into the sea whilst also leading into a space beyond the pictorial plane. Sprinkles of sunlight.mes lt into the cool rippling waters of the bright turquoise sea where the remnants of a summer barbeque – lawn chairs, benches, beach towels and a grill – soak under the heat of multiple suns. The deserted geometric dockyard recalls the surreal architectural landscape of Giorgio de Chirico, whilst the scattering rays of the sun echo the lyrical starlit skies of Vincent Van Gogh. Painted in a bright, electrifying colour palette, the shifting perspectives of the present work resembles the playful interiors of David Hockney, defining and denying certainty of space in the artist’s imaginary realm.
“Within an interior, you can make a landscape through a window or you can make another person’s painting within the painting, or you can paint figures or not… Interiors became the foundation where I could lay all different artists who have come before me into and onto the painting.”
The fragmented view, signature of the artist’s interiors, tilts our orientation into otherworldly horizons, only to encourage the viewer back to the reality of the painting; as Jason Stops observes, Hughes’s landscapes “reveal a mystifying breach between our own subjection perceptions, our memories of lived event and reality” (Jason Stopa, “Tripping Out: The Upended Landscapes of Shara Hughes,” Hyperallgergic, 5 March 2016). On the surface of the present work, Hughes works with a wide range of medium to form double rainbows, blazing sunlight and spatially ambiguous walls, reflecting her intuitive working process. The paintings contain psychological complexity, bringing to life a world that is elegantly chaotic — infused with a vibrant harmony of the organic, the subjective, and the surreal.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence
Born in 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia, Hughes studied Replica Handbags
at the Rhode Island School of Design. Upon her graduation in 2004, Hughes won swift acclaim for her large-scale interiors of imaginary rooms. Now living and working in Brooklyn, New York, her work has been the subject of a number of recent solo exhibitions at prestigious museums, including Le Consortium, Garden Museum, London, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis. This September, Kunstmuseum Luzern will open a solo show of Hughes’s work, building upon her immense institutional exposure. At only 41 years old, Hughes work remains in a number of prestigious museum collects
ions, including The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.