.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 2017, Rough Terrain is a radiant and majestic example of Shara Hughes’ landscapes. In vivid tones of green, orange, teal and magenta, the artist weaves a fantastical vision of rivers and mountains, bathed in the pale light of the moon. Colours blend and merge in liquid striations; elsewhere, Hughes’ palette is crisp and defined, coalescing in geological formations and patterns. Recently the subject of a major exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, Hughes turned to landscape painting in 2014, moving away from her previous depictions of interiors. In the same vein as these works, however, her sweeping vistas were ultimately construed as introspective, psychological spaces, in which personal emotion and experience gave rise to dreamlike painterly worlds. Hughes’ vivid art historical imagination is brought to bear upon the present work, with echoes of Fauvism, Surrealism and Expressionism resounding in its depths. The ‘rough terrain’ of its title translates into rich topographies of impasto and abstract washes of colour, each a projection of her own mental landscape.
One of the foremost figurative painters of her generation, Hughes has risen to prominence over the last fifteen years. Since 2021 she has mounted solo shows at institutions including the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis and Le Consortium, Dijon, as well as presenting her first UK institutional exhibition at the Garden Museum, London. Hughes studied at Rhode Island School of Design, where her early playful interior scenes first began to take shape. Her practice evolved significantly after she settled in New York in 2014, having spent several years moving back and forth to her native Atlanta. Feeling suffocated by restrictions of her previous subject matter, and its reliance on figuration and narrative, she resolved to ‘just make landscape paintings’. These works, however, were ‘not really about landscapes at all’, but rather were vehicles for gesture and illusion: spaces into which she could project abstract memory and emotion, without relying too heavily on recognisable objects and scenarios (S. Hughes, quoted in Shara Hughes: On Edge, Gallery Guide, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2021, n. p.).
By engaging with a genre so rich in its own history, Hughes stages mesmeric dialogues with the art of the past. ‘I wondered how I could take something that is seemingly so known and make it mine,’ she says, ‘while still getting all the satisfaction of painting, and the history of painting, in one’ (S. Hughes, quoted in K. White, ‘“Landscapes Opened a Whole New World for Me”: Artist Shara Hughes on How She Subverts the Tradition of Flower Painting’, Artnet News, 17 August 2020). Employing a jewel-toned colour palette reminiscent of André Derain and Henri Matisse, the present work’s moonlit scene conjures the atmospheric worlds of Max Ernst or Edvard Munch. Hughes’ brushwork, meanwhile, invites comparison with the abstract ‘staining’ of Morris Louis, or the jagged colour fields of Clyfford Still. None of these references, however, are fixed: each morphs and mutates in a manner that approximates the very flux of nature itself. Like changing cloud patterns, or fading seasons, any sense of concrete meaning slips continually from our grasp. In Rough Terrain, Hughes captures the beautiful, volatile slippages that dictate the rhythms of life: of nature, of painting and of thought.
One of the foremost figurative painters of her generation, Hughes has risen to prominence over the last fifteen years. Since 2021 she has mounted solo shows at institutions including the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis and Le Consortium, Dijon, as well as presenting her first UK institutional exhibition at the Garden Museum, London. Hughes studied at Rhode Island School of Design, where her early playful interior scenes first began to take shape. Her practice evolved significantly after she settled in New York in 2014, having spent several years moving back and forth to her native Atlanta. Feeling suffocated by restrictions of her previous subject matter, and its reliance on figuration and narrative, she resolved to ‘just make landscape paintings’. These works, however, were ‘not really about landscapes at all’, but rather were vehicles for gesture and illusion: spaces into which she could project abstract memory and emotion, without relying too heavily on recognisable objects and scenarios (S. Hughes, quoted in Shara Hughes: On Edge, Gallery Guide, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2021, n. p.).
By engaging with a genre so rich in its own history, Hughes stages mesmeric dialogues with the art of the past. ‘I wondered how I could take something that is seemingly so known and make it mine,’ she says, ‘while still getting all the satisfaction of painting, and the history of painting, in one’ (S. Hughes, quoted in K. White, ‘“Landscapes Opened a Whole New World for Me”: Artist Shara Hughes on How She Subverts the Tradition of Flower Painting’, Artnet News, 17 August 2020). Employing a jewel-toned colour palette reminiscent of André Derain and Henri Matisse, the present work’s moonlit scene conjures the atmospheric worlds of Max Ernst or Edvard Munch. Hughes’ brushwork, meanwhile, invites comparison with the abstract ‘staining’ of Morris Louis, or the jagged colour fields of Clyfford Still. None of these references, however, are fixed: each morphs and mutates in a manner that approximates the very flux of nature itself. Like changing cloud patterns, or fading seasons, any sense of concrete meaning slips continually from our grasp. In Rough Terrain, Hughes captures the beautiful, volatile slippages that dictate the rhythms of life: of nature, of painting and of thought.