Image: Albertina, Vienna
The Albertina is presenting ‘Shara Hughes: Sink In’, an exhibition of paintings and ceramics featuring fields of flowers, enchanted forests, waterfalls, and other psychologically charged landscapes, at the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna from 9 October 2026 until 28 February 2027. The exhibition explores Hughes’s expressive use of color and references to Fauvism, modern Expressionism, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
The imagery includes fields of flowers, enchanted forests, and mysterious waterfalls that seem as if born of a wild fever dream. Gigantic flowers weave their way toward the sky like trees, while plants mutate into things that seem familiar yet unknown. Elsewhere, blazing sunsets reflect upon the water, and stars glow on the horizon, bathing the landscape in their supernatural light.
Hughes’s paintings embody a journey through the trials and tribulations, as well as the jungle-like terrain, of an overwhelmingly rich inner world; their motifs are charged with symbolism. Shara Hughes was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1981.
While some works pay homage to Georgia O’Keeffe, Hughes’s expressive use of color is owed above all to Fauvist approaches to landscape depiction and to the Expressionism of the modern era.
