Overview
Right This Way presents over 30 new and recent works completed by Shara Hughes between 2016 and 2023, including large-scale paintings and works on paper.
Hughes’s works are at once surreal and abstract, inviting and alarming, beautiful and scary. Their bold, clashing colours and shifting perspectives manifest into immersive and dream-like landscapes. Profoundly personal, and rich in memories and real-life experiences, her 'invented landscapes,' as she calls them, depict neither true-to-life landscapes nor the imagined. Instead, they invite us in as portals to our own experiences and psychological discovery.
Despite the seemingly familiar framing of landscape motifs, her works encourage us to look beyond what we think we see, or to 're-see,' as Hughes puts it. Nature appears between form and formlessness. It is clear that colour dominates—liberated in every work, gesture, and form.
In our contemporary world, in which answers (we may presume) are readily available, her visual conundrums are utterly refreshing—paradoxically offering the viewer both a puzzle and a path. After a short residency in Denmark in 2022 to create new works for this exhibition, Hughes remarked how she became drawn to the long horizon line, where the sea touches the sky, and how it changes constantly throughout the day. She said, “…there’s always something to learn about the passing of time and what that does to anything living, whether it’s mentally or physically.” Hughes later added, “All of the changing shapes and colours I saw in Denmark repeat themselves in the paintings and drawings.”
