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Lot Essay
Painted on a summer residency in Vejby, Denmark in 2009, Me Me Me is a vivid example of the complex, playful interior scenes that first propelled Shara Hughes to worldwide acclaim. On a speckled terrazzo floor stand an array of brightly-patterned furnishings, including a shaggy blue rug, a rolled-up yoga mat and a psychedelic armchair. An empty easel perches on a paint-spattered platform before three stacked tables of marble, wood and glass, atop which are a group of abstract sculptures. A mysterious red staircase plunges down from the floor. Outside, bordered by orange window-frames and a pair of classical columns, a blue vista of sky and sea spans the full width of the picture: a plane zips across the heavens, leaving a vapour-trail that spells out the title’s Me Me Me. From hatched oil-pastel to metallic gold detailing, intricate sgraffito, and the thick, tube-squeezed fluting of enamel impasto that sculpts the ceiling and pillars, Hughes conjures her dreamlike scene in a rich diversity of textures. Poking fun at the idea of painting as self-expression, she seems to imagine an artist gleefully absconding from the studio to write their ego across the canvas of the sky.
Hughes’ work can be seen in the self-referential lineage of artists like David Hockney and Henri Matisse, whose early masterpieces such as Interior with Aubergines (1911) used devices including mirrors, windows and patterned fabrics to play theatrically with ‘painting within painting’. Layering ideas from the raw material of art history, Me Me Me likewise dances between flat, abstract motifs and illusionistic space. ‘I have always used this feeling of collage through different ways to use paint’, Hughes has said. ‘Texture, pattern, and perspective is something I like to use to describe a space in ways that don’t always make sense’ (S. Hughes, quoted in ‘Shara Hughes, Featured Artist’, Maake Magazine, Issue 1, 2015, n.p.). She paints intuitively, guided by the surface of the work and a sense of narrative wit: the present picture’s obscurely symbolic tableau is typical of her interiors, which often appear to have been recently vacated by a human subject. While Hughes plunders painting’s past with magpie glee, Me Me Me is animated by an imaginative magic that is entirely her own.
Hughes’ work can be seen in the self-referential lineage of artists like David Hockney and Henri Matisse, whose early masterpieces such as Interior with Aubergines (1911) used devices including mirrors, windows and patterned fabrics to play theatrically with ‘painting within painting’. Layering ideas from the raw material of art history, Me Me Me likewise dances between flat, abstract motifs and illusionistic space. ‘I have always used this feeling of collage through different ways to use paint’, Hughes has said. ‘Texture, pattern, and perspective is something I like to use to describe a space in ways that don’t always make sense’ (S. Hughes, quoted in ‘Shara Hughes, Featured Artist’, Maake Magazine, Issue 1, 2015, n.p.). She paints intuitively, guided by the surface of the work and a sense of narrative wit: the present picture’s obscurely symbolic tableau is typical of her interiors, which often appear to have been recently vacated by a human subject. While Hughes plunders painting’s past with magpie glee, Me Me Me is animated by an imaginative magic that is entirely her own.