Shara Hughes is one of those names that surged during the pandemic, when demand for her paintings spiked and prices climbed quickly, culminating in her record sale of $2,940,000 at Christie’s in May 2022. Yet interest in her work has not waned. Her lush, vibrant visions of nature continue to strike a universal chord, speaking to the human condition and our connection to the world in ways that move beyond market trends.
Her new body of work, unveiled in “Weather Report” at David Kordansky Gallery during Armory and New York art week, demonstrates Hughes’s painterly command and the existential weight her practice has taken on. Each of the nine large-scale canvases on view unfolds as a dense world of thought and feeling, of self-reflection and experimentation, the outpouring of an artist confronting a pivotal moment in both her life and her creative path.
“Over the past year or so, I’ve just become more connected to myself, and that kind of growth happens naturally as we get older,” Hughes says when we catch up after the fairs, reflecting on the many shifts in her life recently—her parents aging, her marriage, her friends having children—and how these changes inevitably shape how she sees and makes work. “I’m getting into middle age, and it feels like those kinds of things are becoming more real,” she adds. Questions about the afterlife, about the fleeting and fragile nature of emotions and existence, surface in waves, not constantly but with force when they arrive. “Last summer, I did lose someone in my family, and even though we weren’t especially close, her death jolted me into thinking, what if that were me? It pushed me into those spiritual questions: what is the afterlife, is it really so scary?”
While Hughes did not set out to make this show a meditation on existential themes, they inevitably shape the works. Her approach to the canvas remains instinctive, driven by an intuitive response to what colors and gestures suggest. Brushstrokes build layer by layer, forming compositions of vibrant tones and painterly currents that resist conventional representation, instead settling into an unorthodox balance.
“The way I work is really abstract. At the beginning, I might just throw down a few colors and then respond to them, letting the painting guide me more than me directing it,” Hughes admits. “In that sense, it’s very intuitive and reactionary to both the canvas and myself,” she adds. “I’m not trying to illustrate anything specific; the painting shows me how I feel.”
For this reason, Hughes often describes her works as psychological and emotional landscapes: the progressive layering of paint and shifting colors mirrors the complexity of how we process and elaborate the surrounding reality through our senses. Her image-making follows and echoes the meaning-making process we all undergo in “being-in-the-world,” something that precedes any linguistic or symbolic codification. “Often I start without a clear goal, and the painting ends up teaching me—showing me I’m thinking about something or still upset about something agitating inside.”
Although these works may appear semi-abstract, they represent something very real for Hughes—the reality of the psyche, and the intricate interplay of senses, emotions, and psychological, even pre-cognitive, experience. “Every single thing I paint feels deeply connected to my own experience,” she clarifies. “I hate when people use the word ‘fantasy’ to describe my work because these aren’t fantastical places; they’re real to me, part of my lived experience. They’re very much grounded in reality.”
Hughes often describes her works as autobiographical, though they are less about recounting events than translating moods and emotional atmospheres. “‘This is how I feel about this event.’ It’s more about filtering my feelings through the idea of landscape,” she explains.
Her recurring choice of landscapes and nature as sites to project and reflect her feelings is tied to her upbringing in Atlanta, Georgia. “I wasn’t in wild nature every day—it was the city—but I lived on a lake, so I spent a lot of time outdoors,” she recounts. “My family also had a tree farm about two hours south, and I’d go there often with my brothers and friends. I did a lot of camping and backpacking, so I always felt a connection to nature.” Interestingly, Hughes only began painting landscapes after moving to New York, perhaps as a way of longing for the lush environments that had long shaped her life and imagination.
What immediately strikes viewers in this new body of work is its heightened luminosity, which expands the canvas into surrounding space with an auratic, almost epiphanic presence that extends beyond the physical surface. If Hughes’s paintings have always had the ability to channel the very energy of the landscape, this series feels animated by a deeper animistic spirituality, suggesting an intensified awareness of the need to emotionally reattune with our environment and reconceive ourselves as part of broader ecologies of interdependence and symbiotic relations.
Hughes recalls visiting Niagara Falls last summer and being overwhelmed by the sheer force of nature and the vitality of its primordial energy. That same sensation flows through these canvases, where she seeks to capture the generative power that art-making can unlock. Works such as The Good Light (2025), The Rift (2025) and Niagara (2025) transpose onto canvas the relentless vitality of flowing water and the radiant energy of sunlight colliding with cascading drops that dissolve into air before beginning their cycle anew.
For Hughes, these paintings are less about the afterlife than about a larger current of energy that surpasses us. “It’s the cycle of life, for sure, but also the force behind it—something hopeful and exciting we can lean on,” she reflects. In Mama (2025), for example, she sought to express nature as a quilt or a hug—something stable and generative, a maternal presence, the timeless archetype of Mother Nature. “It could be a mound of flowers larger than life, or a rock that transforms into a figure you might go to for stability or even worship, like a Madonna figure,” she explains. “All of these elements are part of nature, but also part of the psychological landscapes I’m always exploring.”
Hughes’s paintings humanize and personify nature, giving it the presence of characters. In Bigger Person (2024), the interwoven visual field between foreground and background becomes the stage for a tension between figuration and abstraction, between human and nature, which ultimately coexist in a generative exchange of forces. “Often I use trees, plants and flowers to suggest a human presence, a self-portrait or even a portrait of someone. In that way, the landscape imagery allows me to connect with everyone,” Hughes reflects. Nature becomes, for her, a platform to contemplate human existence beyond categorization and individuation, reaching instead for universality. “A tree doesn’t need to be labeled as female or male or given a certain skin color or age. It becomes universal.”
Other paintings, like Pearl Gate (2025), appear to inhabit a liminal space beyond both the sensory and human world, evoking an archetypal and magical dimension of landscape, one historically acknowledged and embraced through symbols and rituals, often in opposition to anthropocentric, rational or scientific narratives.
In this sense, Hughes’s approach to landscape echoes that of Romanticism, which treated nature not simply as a subject to be depicted but as a privileged arena for probing the essence of the human condition in relation to immensity. For the Romantics, landscape was never mere scenery but rather a stage on which to confront mortality, transcendence and the fragile limits of human power against overwhelming natural forces. Hughes recognizes this legacy, acknowledging that her paintings respond to the same Romantic notion of the “sublime”: a vision of nature that provokes wonder and terror, awe and unease in equal measure.
Ultimately, while Hughes insists on grounding her works in sensorial and emotional human perception, these syntheses of color, light and natural elements—offered to the human eye yet absent of the human subject—gesture toward more-than-human realms and beyond human time. They suggest alternative ways of feeling, perceiving and embracing the vital entanglements of life forms and cosmic phenomena on which our existence depends.
Hughes’s works exist in and are nourished by this liminal space, poised between the sensorial and the psychological, the earthly and the unearthly—a threshold only color and paint can traverse. “I think I’m always contradicting myself in the work, and that’s important,” Hughes says. “What does continue to grow, though, is my connection to the work and my confidence in it, and maybe that comes through in the expansion of approaches and how many different types of painting are in the show.”
Yet these luminous landscapes also function as portals between worlds, suggesting that the longing for transcendence can be satisfied by contemplating nature. In doing so, they invite us to accept both the limits and possibilities of our human position within it while rediscovering nature’s spiritual and energetic force once we reattune ourselves to its primordial powers of creation over destruction.
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