A striking example of Shara Hughes’ fantastical landscapes, Sticks and Stones from 2018 illuminates a vivid engagement with colour and light, and a harmonic balance between the natural and the imaginative, the organic and the surreal. Hovering between representation and abstraction, Hughes’ landscape evokes a whimsical, otherworldly realm via expressive, sinuous brushstrokes. The present work was the centrepiece of Berggruen Gallery’s 2018 show Shara Hughes: Sticks and Stones which included twelve large-scale canvases. Taking flowers and psychedelic garden scenes as her central subject and adopting a rich colour palette, Hughes toys with surrealism and abstraction via an investigation into the genre of contemporary landscape painting, in turn interrogating the role of flowers and trees within the canon of art history. Elements of her landscapes often hint at the figurative, and the artist herself has noted, “I have often thought of the flowers and trees as figures. Somet.mes s, even a wave or a sun in the painting takes on a personality, so it varies depending on how the work turns out” (Shara Hughes quoted in: “Shara Hughes – Interview: ‘I wanted the works to feel like figures you would visit at a church, something divine,’” in Studio International, 17 May 2021 (online)).

Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1981, Shara Hughes earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and graduated from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Madison, Maine in 2011. She now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been the subject of a number of recent solo exhibitions at prestigious museums, including Le Consortium, Dijon (Shara Hughes: Pivot, November 2020 – June 2021), Garden Museum, London (Shara Hughes, May – June 2021), Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (Shara Hughes, July 2021 – September 2021) and Yuz Museum, Shanghai (Shara Hughes: The Bridge, November 2021 – January 2022). Next September Kunstmuseum Luzern will open a solo show of Hughes’ work, building upon her immense institutional exposure. At only 41 years old, Hughes work remains in a number of museum collects ions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (How Do You Sleep At Night, 2017) and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (In the Clear, 2016).