Shara Hughes

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

“The landscape is so seemingly simple. 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”.

- Shara Hughes

In Untitled, Shara Hughes utilizes thoughtful, soft, and subtle brushstrokes to create a pool with the appearance of a surrealistic delight . Two girls in the pool on the left side of the composition obtrude the viewers into the tranquil scene. Inundated by the vibrantly chromatic image, the viewer immediately becomes drawn into the bold, clashing color palette. While her  palette is reminiscent of the highly saturated colors of David Hockney’s pool paintings, her biomorphic forms recall the works of the Surrealists, and her decorative framing devices reveal an indebtedness to the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. 

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  Garden Museum, London; Aspen Art Museum, and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Next September Kunst museum Luzern will open a solo show of Hughes’ work, building upon her immense institutional exposure. Hughes' work resides in a number of museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York And The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York