In a single portray, we gaze upon shiny night time skies surreally lit by a glowing purple moon. In one other, we peer via fairy-tale woods crammed with knobby, bending bushes in hues of yellows and pinks. These luminous landscapes are the creations of Brooklyn-based artist Shara Hughes (b. 1981), and are drawn not from the bodily world, however from the nebulous terrains of creativeness and reminiscence.
In recent times, Hughes, who’s represented in Europe by Zurich’s Galerie Eva Presenhuber, has change into a favourite of collectors and establishments, with museum exhibitions on the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, the Modern Artwork Museum St. Louis, and Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2021 alone. Now the Kunstmuseum Luzern is opening “Time Lapsed,” a solo present of her current work (September 17–November 11, 2022).
Because the exhibition title would counsel, these out-of-the-ordinary work trace on the experiences and perceptions of time’s passing via the lens of nature. Time, in these photographs, can really feel alternately everlasting and ephemeral—an historical forest assembly a fleeting sundown inside a single picture. Many had been created during times of isolation in 2020 and 2021; with names like A Turbulent Yr and In a Haze, these works trace on the blurring of days and weeks many individuals skilled in isolation, in addition to a simultaneous particular person reconnection to the atmosphere.
Shara Hughes, Attraction Contraption (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photograph: Stan Narten, JSP Artwork Images.
Whereas Hughes’s lavish botanical work readily invite comparisons to works by the Symbolist visions of Odilon Redon, for example, or Vincent van Gogh’s vividly articulated nonetheless lifes and landscapes, her typically large-scale work, with their all-over gestural impact borne of an intuitive course of, additionally trace at influences from such Summary Expressionists as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock. The artist doesn’t make preparatory drawings for her works, as a substitute working from intuition and a relinquishing of compositional management that Hughes feels permits for a freer picture to emerge.
“These fantasy landscapes fulfill our want for magnificence on the one hand, but additionally arouse a slight uneasiness on the opposite. The character depicted appears irrepressible and at occasions even threatening in its exuberant fullness. Shara Hughes’s landscapes are temper footage that convey emotions, feelings, or recollections,” wrote the Kunstmuseum Luzern in a press release. “Time Lapsed” was curated by Fanni Fetzer and marks Hughes’s first institutional exhibition in Switzerland.
See photographs from the exhibition under.
Shara Hughes, Glow within the Darkish (2017). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Photograph: Stan Narten, JSP Artwork Images.
Shara Hughes, In a Haze (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Photograph: Stan Narten, JSP Artwork Images.
Shara Hughes, My Violet Lullaby (2021). Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Photograph: Stan Narten.
Shara Hughes, It’s Not in Your Fingers (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photograph: Stan Narten, JSP Artwork Images.
“Shara Hughes: Time Lapsed” is on view at Kunstmuseum Luzern from September 17 via November 11, 2022.
Observe Artnet Information on Fb:
Wish to keep forward of the artwork world? Subscribe to our publication to get the breaking information, eye-opening interviews, and incisive crucial takes that drive the dialog ahead.