Shara Hughes

The US artist Shara Hughes paints landscapes – mountains, trees, meadows, clouds, rivers and sunsets. They are not images of real landscapes, but are created in the process of painting from imagination and memory. Her "invented landscapes" are, as it were, portraits of the soul, metaphors for inner states, sometimes sharply contoured, sometimes more collaged, sometimes almost abstract: brushstrokes encircle a waterfall, dark dots transform into stormy skies, broadly contoured rays envelop sun and clouds. There is something eerie, magical, fantastic about her paintings. Hughes takes landscape painting to a new level, beyond kitsch and clichés.

Hughes has had numerous exhibitions in the US and Europe including recent solo shows at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Le Consortium, Dijon; Monotypes; and Sabine Knust Gallery, Munich. Her work can be found in numerous museum collections including: Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO); Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris, FR); Jorge M. Perez Collection (Miami, FL); and MoMA (New York, NY).

Shara Hughes (born 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.