Shara Hughes - New Now New York Tuesday, March 12, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Bridging the gap between interior and exterior, real and imaginary, Shara Hughes’ Lillypad Palace, 2016, seeks to reexamine the traditions of the landscape painting genre. Creating a setting that is at once familiar and foreign, the vibrant colors and emotive brushstrokes of the present work imbues the art historical precedent of landscapes with a new, modern sensibility. Turning to landscape painting just two years before creating the present work, the engagement of energetic brushstrokes and vibrant color is central to the artist’s practice, creating a pictorial vocabulary that exists within a genre of its own.

    “I don’t have any plans when I start a landscape; it is usually very subconscious and intuitive. I merely play around with color and texture... and then something clicks and I start to organize it into a landscape that doesn’t necessarily identify with a specific place.”
    —Shara Hughes

    Flanked by very thin energetic trees, the eponymous Lillypad Palace seems to melt into the sky beyond the pond, blurring the separation of sky and water and extending the field of view. The setting is at once familiar and foreign, non-descript enough that it could represent any place at any time. Not meant to depict a particular landscape and created without the use of reference imagery, the present work reflects, as noted by Hughes, the idea that “all landscapes are constantly changing, whether it’s the time of day or the temperature or the weather patterns and things growing and dying. The constant change created so much possibility.”i Further, the artist notes, “I have often thought of flowers and trees as figures. Sometimes, even a wave or a sun in the painting takes on a personality, so it varies depending on how the work turns out.”ii In doing so, the thin trees framing the seemingly endless pond come to life, creating a setting as vibrant as the colors used to depict it.  

     

    Painting without a plan, Hughes’ practice is influenced by a variety of art historical references, bringing landscape painting traditions of the past into the 21st century. Allowing herself to play with color, the gestural brushstrokes of the lily pads in Lillypad Palace are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionists like Helen Frankenthaler, while the vibrancy and layered media are reminiscent of Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh. Imbuing these movements with a fresh twist, Hughes’ landscapes represent the spontaneity of nature in a way that is unique to her practice. Departing from the dutiful representations of the natural world, Lillypad Palace and Hughes’ larger oeuvre infuses modernity into tradition, creating a synthesis of past and present. Renowned for her interior and exterior scenes, Hughes’ works are held in a number of institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Denver Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

     

    Claude Monet, Water Lily Pond, 1917/19, Art Institute of Chicago. Image: Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. Harvey Kaplan, 1982.825

    Shara Hughes, quoted in Katie White, “’Landscapes Opened a Whole New World for Me’: Artist Shara Hughes on How She Subverts the Tradition of Flower Painting,” Artnet News, August 17, 2020, online.

    ii Shara Hughes, quoted in Emily Spicer, “Shara Hughes – Interview: ‘I wanted the works to feel like figures you would visit at a church, something divine,” in Studio International, May 14, 2021, online.

    • Provenance

      Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2016

    • Artist Biography

      Shara Hughes

      Shara Hughes (b. 1981) earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

      The artist is best known for her colorful landscapes which bridge a gap between the real and the imagined, and the beautiful and the chaotic. Working intuitively, the artist does not typically pre-plan her canvases. Rather her process involves giving form and shape to her previously applied brushstrokes and reacting to her last applications of paint and color through more painting. 

      Hughes has participated in numerous group exhibitions, at venues such as FLAG Art Foundation, NY (2023); ICA Miami (2022); De la Cruz Collection (2022); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2021); Dallas Art Museum, Dallas (2019); MASS MoCA, North Adams (2018); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2015). The artist was also included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Hughes’ work belongs to many prominent museum collections including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Jorge M. Perez Collection, Miami, FL; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA; the M Woods Museum, Beijing, China; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; the Si Shang Art Museum, Beijing, China; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; among others. Hughes lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

       
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Property from an Important West Coast Collection

25

Lillypad Palace

signed, titled and dated “SHARA HUGHES 2016 “Lillypad Palace”” on the reverse
oil, acrylic, chalk and airbrush on canvas
48 x 40 in. (121.9 x 101.6 cm)
Executed in 2016.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for $234,950

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com
 

New Now

New York Auction 12 March 2024