Shara Hughes — Tree Farm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present Tree Farm, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition with the New York-based artist Shara Hughes. 

When Hughes moved to New York in 2014, she had been painting interiors, calculated spaces that frame figures and prop-like objects of personal significance. Soon thereafter, she left these rooms, conjuring instead exterior scenes of swamps and lakes, dense woodlands with strokes for leaves and clearings opening to patches of thunderous faraway skies. Some vistas were framed within a proscenium of branches or the aperture of a cresting wave—pictorial devices signaling the image as having been staged. Hughes has described these ongoing works from the last decade as kinds of imaginary landscapes, most literally in that they do not depict specific places. But this further suggests how Hughes appropriates the genre as a way to think about how one might arrange color and shape on a flat surface into something recognizable.