SHARA HUGHES: WEATHER REPORT
DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY is pleased to present Weather Report, an exhibition of new paintings by Shara Hughes.
September 04 – October 18, 2025
In her newest paintings, Hughes continues to redefine how the medium records—and generates—the experience of being human. These are, at the same time, some of the most personal and the most far-reaching works she has made to date. Each of the nine large-scale works on view encompasses a world of thought, feeling, self-reflection, and open-ended experimentation. And while thematic connections between the paintings abound, Hughes demonstrates here the fully embodied commitment she brings to each painting as a standalone experience for artist and viewer alike. All the paintings are vertically oriented and sized so that they are at once immersive and intimate.
Over the course of her career, Hughes has increasingly expanded the potential of the landscape genre, creating works that communicate moods, ideas, and other features of inner life which resist easy categorization. Even as elements of the natural world—trees, flowers, water, horizon lines, geological features—occupy a foundational role in her compositions, she allows active brushwork and vivid color to become subjects in their own right, so that each work is an environment where observation, imagination, and emotion blend together in ever new ways. The palpable sense of movement with which Hughes both defines and joins her forms calls attention to the presence of forces that might best be called abstract were they not so tangible, direct, and full of painterly warmth.
MaMa (2025), an eight-foot-tall painting of a forest scene, for instance, is dominated by a luminous field of red, orange, and yellow that cascades down from the sun-like head of a flower anchoring the composition’s top edge. Hughes conjures a space full of mysterious depth even as she allows herself to revel in the fully material, non-illusionistic realm of a picture plane, with an encyclopedic array of mark-making approaches and textural details.