Shara Hughes

Published with Norton Museum of Art.

Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-based artist Shara Hughes (born 1981) is known for her vibrant painted landscapes that blur the boundary between figuration and abstraction. Her practice is intuitive, steering clear of direct observation or external references. She creates distinctive color palettes by mixing pigments directly on the surface, evoking movements such as color field painting and post-Impressionism. The final composition serves as a translation of the complex psychology of Hughes' inner world onto the canvas. Inside Outside, published to accompany the artist's first mid-career survey at the Norton Museum of Art, features work from the past two decades of her career. Organized both chronologically and thematically, it explores the concept of the "window," highlighting Hughes' experiments with ceramics and her ongoing exploration of trees, waterways, mountains and moody interiors.

Landscapes marks the first in-depth survey of the critically acclaimed painting of Brooklyn-based artist Shara Hughes (born 1981). Hughes describes her lush, vibrantly chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as “invented landscapes.” Full of gestural effect, surface tactility and possessing a fairytale mood of reverie, these paintings, as the New Yorker described them, “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.”

This book covers roughly the past four years of Hughes' career, which has proved a prolific and important period for the painter, punctuated by international solo exhibitions, biennials, public projects and museum acquisitions. It features more than 120 full-color illustrations which beautifully illuminate the artist's process and the progression of the landscape as subject matter.