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Lot Essay
A leading figure among a new generation of painters, Shara Hughes’s psychologically-charged landscapes pull from the history of art while also connecting directly with today’s audiences. New Moon Voodoo is a prime example of the artist’s ability to reinvigorate a familiar genre through a careful combination of personal insight and dexterous application. “The landscape is so seemingly simple,” she quips. “Everyone knows what a landscape looks like—there is an entire tradition of painting that informs our expectations. I wondered how I could take something that is seemingly so known and make it mine, 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”, Artnet News, August 17, 2020). Drawing allusions to the striking compositions of Thomas Cole and the vibrantly saturated canvases of Wassily Kandinsky, the artist subverts traditional views of the landscape and challenges the predominately male art historical canon with energetic tableaus filled with movement and hypnotic density.
Rendered on a human scale, New Moon Voodoo captures the viewer in a surface alight with neon hues and optically-rich brushwork. Verdant greens are replaced with vivid pinks, purples, and icy blue as the small copse transforms into fiery, feisty cluster of electric branches and painterly undergrowth. Peering through a tangled thicket, we notice leafy outcroppings and bulbous trees in the background that populate a streaky violet and aqua plain. In the midground, Hughes layers abstract areas that seem to be both patterned inventions and depictions of some alien forest. A blue mass filled with darker strokes and pink dots could be water or an abundance of strange flora that seems to rush toward the center of the work and join the more rocky forms in the foreground. Glowing pink and orange branches extend from the ground as they fight for visual dominance with a thick vertical stroke that shares similarities with a tree trunk blocking our sight line as much as with a glitch or error in a video screen. Her adept mixture of solid line and bleeding, washy color combine to create a surreal scene that might as well have been plucked from a dream.
The viewer finds themselves peering through the thicket to catch a glimpse of the land further afield. As Prudence Peiffer notes, the “trope of peering through an ocular opening onto the world has solid precedents in the Hudson River School and Romantic painters, who employed cave mouths, bramble edges, and cataracts to encircle central depths of field that suggest states of interior and exterior sublime […] Hughes provided a unique contemporary take” (P. Peiffer, “Shara Hughes”, Artforum, April 2016). Hughes points our eyes toward the distant trees but stymies a clear vantage with the central pillar of paint. This occluding element anchors the composition while also creating an urge to peer around it to see the full landscape. By creating this tension, the artist is able to problematize and comment on the relationships between abstraction, representative painting, and historical modes.
Born in Atlanta, GA, Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Known early in her career for pensive interiors that highlighted mental states and personal ruminations, her examination of these introspective modes collided with her interest in the history of art. Realized the same year as her inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New Moon Voodoo is a powerful example of Hughes’s shift toward landscape painting. Turning toward abstract depictions of trees, rocks, and picturesque vistas in 2015, she established a link to artists like Gustav Klimt whose plein air paintings used similar methods for visually framing the scene. Taking on a subject so time-honored as landscape, Hughes sought a way to capture its essence and make it her own. Mia Locks noted on the occasion of an exhibition of later works, “[...] Hughes’s foray into landscape painting is driven by a certain ambivalence — the tensions in her work [are] the result of Hughes both embracing and subverting a conventional artistic genre. In this way, her paintings are a feminist effort, consciously or not, putting pressure on a presumed neutrality of landscape imagery (the ‘happy trees’ of Bob Ross, say, or hackneyed scenic postcards) by inviting us to consider how that genre’s allure might be tested in various ways” (M. Locks, “Working Tension: On Shara Hughes’ Landscapes”, in Shara Hughes/Landscapes, Rachel Uffner Gallery, 2019, p.13). By working with an established, recognizable template, Hughes allows for a direct entrance into her canvases that makes them attractive to a viewer. Ensnared by familiarity, they are then left to the painter’s whim as she leads them into a psychologically-rich adventure in an alien land pulsing with energy.
Rendered on a human scale, New Moon Voodoo captures the viewer in a surface alight with neon hues and optically-rich brushwork. Verdant greens are replaced with vivid pinks, purples, and icy blue as the small copse transforms into fiery, feisty cluster of electric branches and painterly undergrowth. Peering through a tangled thicket, we notice leafy outcroppings and bulbous trees in the background that populate a streaky violet and aqua plain. In the midground, Hughes layers abstract areas that seem to be both patterned inventions and depictions of some alien forest. A blue mass filled with darker strokes and pink dots could be water or an abundance of strange flora that seems to rush toward the center of the work and join the more rocky forms in the foreground. Glowing pink and orange branches extend from the ground as they fight for visual dominance with a thick vertical stroke that shares similarities with a tree trunk blocking our sight line as much as with a glitch or error in a video screen. Her adept mixture of solid line and bleeding, washy color combine to create a surreal scene that might as well have been plucked from a dream.
The viewer finds themselves peering through the thicket to catch a glimpse of the land further afield. As Prudence Peiffer notes, the “trope of peering through an ocular opening onto the world has solid precedents in the Hudson River School and Romantic painters, who employed cave mouths, bramble edges, and cataracts to encircle central depths of field that suggest states of interior and exterior sublime […] Hughes provided a unique contemporary take” (P. Peiffer, “Shara Hughes”, Artforum, April 2016). Hughes points our eyes toward the distant trees but stymies a clear vantage with the central pillar of paint. This occluding element anchors the composition while also creating an urge to peer around it to see the full landscape. By creating this tension, the artist is able to problematize and comment on the relationships between abstraction, representative painting, and historical modes.
Born in Atlanta, GA, Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Known early in her career for pensive interiors that highlighted mental states and personal ruminations, her examination of these introspective modes collided with her interest in the history of art. Realized the same year as her inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New Moon Voodoo is a powerful example of Hughes’s shift toward landscape painting. Turning toward abstract depictions of trees, rocks, and picturesque vistas in 2015, she established a link to artists like Gustav Klimt whose plein air paintings used similar methods for visually framing the scene. Taking on a subject so time-honored as landscape, Hughes sought a way to capture its essence and make it her own. Mia Locks noted on the occasion of an exhibition of later works, “[...] Hughes’s foray into landscape painting is driven by a certain ambivalence — the tensions in her work [are] the result of Hughes both embracing and subverting a conventional artistic genre. In this way, her paintings are a feminist effort, consciously or not, putting pressure on a presumed neutrality of landscape imagery (the ‘happy trees’ of Bob Ross, say, or hackneyed scenic postcards) by inviting us to consider how that genre’s allure might be tested in various ways” (M. Locks, “Working Tension: On Shara Hughes’ Landscapes”, in Shara Hughes/Landscapes, Rachel Uffner Gallery, 2019, p.13). By working with an established, recognizable template, Hughes allows for a direct entrance into her canvases that makes them attractive to a viewer. Ensnared by familiarity, they are then left to the painter’s whim as she leads them into a psychologically-rich adventure in an alien land pulsing with energy.