How Do You Sleep At Night?

Shara Hughes

2017 · Oil and acrylic on canvas · Modern and Contemporary Art

This work updates the tradition of landscape painting for contemporary times. Instead of the usual horizontal orientation, Hughes mimics the proportions of a vertical phone screen. Here, six flowers wilt against a sandy cliff. These massive blooms and the colors that surround them arise from a sinuous, gestural approach to painting, lending the work a childlike freedom and brooding sensibility. The bold, sometimes clashing colors recall the Fauvist palette of Henri Matisse and the German Expressionists, not to mention their flair for the symbolic and the psychologically intense. This hallucinatory, invented landscape explores the relationship between abstraction and representation, process and impulse, real and imagined.

Artist

Shara Hughes

Date

2017

Medium

Oil and acrylic on canvas

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Purchase, Blair Effron Gift, 2017