How Do You Sleep At Night?

2017

Not on view

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.

Artwork Details

Overview

Provenance

References

Title: How Do You Sleep At Night?
Artist: Shara Hughes (American, born Atlanta 1981)
Date: 2017
Medium: Oil and acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 68 × 60 in. (172.7 × 152.4 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchase, Blair Effron Gift, 2017
Object Number: 2017.433
Rights and Reproduction: © Shara Hughes
Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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