Ohne Schlüssel und Schloss
Chancen und Risiken von Big Data

Boisterous Compositions

At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.

Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.

Sevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.

“Today’s images are echoes of how people have always been depicted.”

Steven Shearer (b. New Westminster, BC, 1968; lives and works in Vancouver) works in a range of media including printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collages of found photographs. His portraits of individuals in decorated settings earned Shearer international acclaim. They show heroes from the past—protagonists of musical subcultures or the history of art. The archetypal creative minds in their studios appear together with their works; the interiors surrounding them reflect their psychological constitution. Shearer paints them in the style of Symbolism, the German Romantics, or the Fauves. Imitating the perspective painting of the Renaissance, he virtually pulls the beholder into his pictures.

Steven Shearer participated in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design New York Summer Studio Programme in 1992 and studied at the Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver, in 1992. In 2011, he represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale.