PREVIEW:Shara Hughes-Sink In

For around a decade, landscapes have occupied a central place in Shara Hughes’s oeuvre, evoking Georgia O’Keeffe as well as Fauvist approaches to landscape and the Expressionism of classical modernism. Hughes’s landscapes are unreal places. Invented but not fictional, they are neither depictions of nature nor escapist retreats into whimsical dream worlds. Rather, they speak of an ongoing search to make the invisible visible: sensations, memories, moods, those inner states difficult to give shape to.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: ALBERTINA Museum Archive

With “Sink In”, her first solo museum exhibition in Austria, Shara Hughes invites viewers into an immersive ecosystem where the familiar and the fantastical collide. Named after a landmark painting from 2026, the exhibition’s title operates as both an invitation and a methodology: the deeper one plunges into her visual worlds, the stronger the emotional resonance of a landscape that feels simultaneously alien and intimate. The exhibition orchestrates a close dialogue across mediums, placing her large-scale canvases and works on paper alongside tactile ceramic sculptures. These ceramics function as three-dimensional translations of the organic, dreamlike topographies found in her flat works, bringing the imagined physics of her paintings directly into physical space.

Hughes’s painterly practice begins on the floor, entirely liberated from preordained blueprints or rigid compositional plans. Working horizontally, she lays down her first strokes and lets thinned colors bleed, pool, and interact on their own terms. Central to this approach is her stain technique, which strongly echoes Helen Frankenthaler’s historic “soak-stain” paintings. By allowing paint to seep directly into the raw substrate, Hughes surrenders total control, transforming the canvas into an active partner. Unexpected blurs, physical shifts, and accidental marks are never erased or corrected; instead, she welcomes them as generative sparks for her next move.

This deliberate embrace of chance acts as a tool to undermine traditional self-authorship, tapping into an unadulterated, childlike immediacy. Guided by intuition, Hughes navigates each painting until it reaches a delicate equilibrium. She balances a drive to saturate every square inch with vivid color and intricate detail against a conscious choice to leave open, undeveloped canvas. Where hyper-elaborated fields meet quiet void, a vibrant tension arises between excess and emptiness, offering viewers a vast, open-ended space for their own imagination.

While her large-scale oil paintings demand physical studio space, Hughes’s works on paper register a lighter, more nimble practice. Created primarily while traveling or at home rather than in the studio, these small, intimate pieces use accessible everyday mediums like wax crayons, colored pencils, and felt-tip pens to evoke enchanted, exotic landscapes.

Working on paper introduces a stark material reality: irreversibility. Unlike oil paint, which can be scraped away or painted over, a mark drawn on paper cannot be undone. The strokes remain starkly exposed on the picture plane. Paradoxically, this high-stakes irreversibility grants Hughes greater freedom. Paper serves as an immediate testing ground—a sketchbook for capturing raw, unfiltered impulses before conscious reflection or conceptual control can sanitize the mark. Quick, energetic lines coalesce into ornamental, semi-abstract planes, preserving the raw urgency of a first thought.

In her recent work, Hughes’s imagery spans a vast emotional and visual range—from upward perspectives through tangled tree branches to explosive volcanic eruptions and panoramic vistas. While maintaining her signature high-voltage, luminous palette, her recent compositions lean increasingly toward abstraction, driven by organic intuition rather than programmatic design.

This ongoing negotiation between intention and chance culminates in her ceramic works. During the firing process, clay and glazes undergo drastic, uncontrollable physical transformations, resulting in unexpected shrinkage, cracking, and glaze shifts. Rather than treating these thermal deviations as structural flaws, Hughes embraces them as independent, productive facets of her artistic endeavor. The heat of the kiln completes what her hands initiated, grounding her painted fantasies in the unpredictable realities of material transformation.

Photo left: Shara Hughes, Pop, 2021, Oil, acrylic and dye on canvas, 244 × 183 cm, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. Donation: Fondation Croÿ Roeulx © Shara Hughes, Photo: JSP Art Photography. Photo right: Shara Hughes, Sink In, 2026, Oil and dye on canvas 279.5 × 183 cm, Private collection, © Shara Hughes, Photo: JSP Art Photography

Info: Curators: Angela Stief and Melissa Lumbroso, The ALBERTINA Museum, Albertinaplatz, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 9/10/2026-28/2/2027, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue, Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed & Fri 10:00-21:00, www.albertina.at/