Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 5

Born 1981 in Atlanta, GA
Lives in Brooklyn, NY

The lush medleys of color, pattern, and texture within Shara Hughes’s landscape paintings are products of both her imagination and her painterly process. Referencing painting’s traditional role of offering a window onto another world, Hughes’s work often presents framed views of hallucinatory realms.

Hughes frequently begins a composition by altering the canvas surface in ways that she then has to improvise against. She might cover part of the canvas in a gessoa thick, gluelike substance that lends the surface a feeling of solidity—or she might spray paint the canvas from behind, making marks that emerge murkily from beneath the weave. These opening moves serve as the artist’s challenge to herself, concrete realities that she must respond to in her creation of psychological scenes that are part landscape, part abstraction.