Before it closes this Saturday, June 23, try to see the dozen colorful paintings by Shara Hughes on view at Berggruen Gallery. Large canvases, all but one painted this year, purport to be landscapes. In the best tradition of Modernism, however, they provide the artist with opportunities to demonstrate her exceptional formal skills and her knowledge of past art.
Overall, the works owe a debt to another female painter of the moment, Dana Schutz. Just five years separate the two, and both were included in last year’s important Whitney Biennial exhibition, yet Schutz has been in the spotlight for well more than a decade.
But if the Hughes paintings currently on view in the exhibition Sticks and Stones display a Schutzian color sense and embrace of warped space, they also quote traditional Chinese painting (in a work also called Sticks and Stones), Gustav Klimt (Chaos Chasm), Salvador Dalí (Getting Out From Under) and German Expressionism (throughout). The great pleasure of the show is to see her entering such hallowed ground and getting out with both authenticity and virtuosity intact.
