Sold for: $217,250

PROVENANCE
Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Montreal

Shara Hughes is a widely exhibited contemporary American artist whose vibrant paintings sit happily between landscape and abstraction. More “both / and” than one genre or the other, Rough Rivers deploys recognizable landscape motifs—hills and rivers for example—in an exuberantly abstracted, non-descriptive manner. Hers is a decidedly present-day take on both abstraction as a genre and method, and the long-standing attention to landscape in American painting. Little wonder that she was chosen to show in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the longest-running survey of American art, and that her paintings are currently exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland.

In Rough Rivers, Hughes spontaneously develops a remarkable vocabulary of abstracted earth, water and atmospheric forms. With the work wittily set in a “portrait” format, we can nonetheless readily see the fundamental land / sky divide of “landscape” formats running laterally across the bottom middle of the surface, set down with bold blue and green outlines. But this conventional composition is only hinted at, ready to be further improvised. The largely open zone at the bottom is not a foreground in any expected sense. Instead, it is light in tone, open in design, and—typically for this painting—rendered with a variety of techniques. Red and blue forms appear to be stained into a porous surface, while their white, circular cousins and a few red streaks are painted on top of this dreamy support. The work is painterly, sensuous.

The upper reaches of the canvas could be described as “cosmic” in the sense that they appear as sky above the strong lateral horizon line and because the forms themselves are reminiscent of what we might see and imagine as we look up. The central green form, with its reverberating, outward moving circles, is planet like. This upper zone is animated by lightly applied streaks of dark blue against white paint. We notice that the snaking, river–like form that begins behind the central blue "mountain" winds its way beyond the top boundary of the surface, only to return in the upper right corner. In this way, it frames or holds the three highly coloured and inflected arabesques that dance across this part of the surface. What Hughes never does here is to confine her imaginative, exuberant forms. They are held to focus our attention, but not for analysis. One has the sense that metamorphosis governs this highly organic surface, that what we see now will transmute into an equally intriguing set of patterns and relationships even as we look on.

Painting. Landscape. Abstraction. Recorded with capitals, like chapter headings in a textbook, these categories certainly refer to well-traveled paths in the history of modern and indeed pre-modern art. Many have said that these traditions are outworn and should be eclipsed, but as Hughes shows in Rough Rivers, they continue to deliver inventiveness and visual pleasure. The painting opens towards the future by drawing on the experience and vocabulary afforded by reimagining its conventions.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay. Cheetham is the author of two books on abstract art: The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting and Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 60s.

Please note: this work is unframed.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars