CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/16/2019

Celebrate Pride Month with 'Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings'

"Blue Rug" (1994) is reproduced from Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, the first book on the promising figurative painter who died of AIDS in 1995, at the age of 32. Nelson Santos, Executive Director of Visual AIDS, the book's publisher, writes, "His work, which was increasingly informed by his own illness, is defined by its subject matter—isolation, the fragility of the body, and intimacy between men. Committed to figurative painting at a time when it was out of favor with critics and collectors, Steers nonetheless gained appreciation for his expressionist-realist narratives of a life shadowed by mortality yet infused with wry humor, camp, and what Steers himself called a 'gorgeous bleakness.'"