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Lot Essay
‘I think that nature reflects emotions in so many ways, beauty, pain, peace, sadness can all be seen in one day with the passing of time or with a weather pattern. Nature is constantly changing, you will never see the same flower twice in the exact same way. The light changes; its growing, or dying, and moving. The very reflective of humans and psychology’ – Shara Hughes (quoted in E. Steer, ‘Shara Hughes Uses Painting to Reflect the Turbulent Human Mind’, Elephant, March 16, 2020).
Monumental in scale and exuberant in vision, Soft and Strong stands among the most ambitious examples of Shara Hughes’ celebrated flower paintings. Depicting a towering dandelion from a dramatically low vantage point, the canvas immerses the viewer within a fantastical botanical universe where scale, perspective, and colour are liberated from the conventions of observed reality. Created for Hughes’ major travelling museum exhibition of 2021, the painting was first unveiled at the Garden Museum, London (17 May-6 June 2021), before travelling to the Aspen Art Museum (27 July-26 September 2021), where it formed part of a celebrated group of four monumental, site-specific flower paintings devoted exclusively to individual blooms ranging from umbrella orchids and poppies to dandelions. Following the recent presentation of Shara Hughes: Inside Outside, her first mid-career museum survey at the Norton Museum of Art, Florida (15 November 2025 – 1 March 2026), Hughes’ work will be the subject of a major solo exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, from 9 October 2026 to 28 February 2027.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Early in her career she became known for introspective interior scenes that examined states of mind and personal reflection. Over time, however, these psychological concerns merged with an increasingly expansive engagement with art history, leading to the fantastical landscapes and floral paintings for which she is now celebrated. Drawing upon sources as varied as Symbolism, Fauvism, Surrealism and American landscape painting, Hughes has developed a visual language that is unmistakably her own: one in which imagined worlds become vehicles for exploring the complexities of perception, emotion and memory.
Within this remarkable quartet, the present work is devoted to the dandelion, a motif Hughes elevates to monumental scale. Viewed from a dramatically low vantage point, the flower rises above the viewer like a fantastical monument, its oversized seed heads suspended against a kaleidoscopic sky. The effect is simultaneously immersive and disorienting: by enlarging a humble wildflower beyond its natural proportions, Hughes transforms the traditional still life into an expansive pictorial environment.
This conflation of landscape and psychology lies at the heart of Hughes’ practice. The artist has explained, ‘No, I don’t paint from life at all, ever. My works are more about painting than about nature or something in the real world. They always start from playing around with color and shape and texture. The landscape becomes an access point for the viewer, a lot of times.’ (S. Hughes, quoted in I. Alteveer, “Shara Hughes in Conversation”, in Shara Hughes/Landscapes, Rachel Uffner Gallery, 2019, p.15) Landscape, for Hughes, is a language through which emotion, memory and intuition may be explored. She constructs vividly imagined environments in which colour, scale and perspective are liberated from the constraints of reality.
Monumental in scale and exuberant in vision, Soft and Strong stands among the most ambitious examples of Shara Hughes’ celebrated flower paintings. Depicting a towering dandelion from a dramatically low vantage point, the canvas immerses the viewer within a fantastical botanical universe where scale, perspective, and colour are liberated from the conventions of observed reality. Created for Hughes’ major travelling museum exhibition of 2021, the painting was first unveiled at the Garden Museum, London (17 May-6 June 2021), before travelling to the Aspen Art Museum (27 July-26 September 2021), where it formed part of a celebrated group of four monumental, site-specific flower paintings devoted exclusively to individual blooms ranging from umbrella orchids and poppies to dandelions. Following the recent presentation of Shara Hughes: Inside Outside, her first mid-career museum survey at the Norton Museum of Art, Florida (15 November 2025 – 1 March 2026), Hughes’ work will be the subject of a major solo exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, from 9 October 2026 to 28 February 2027.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Early in her career she became known for introspective interior scenes that examined states of mind and personal reflection. Over time, however, these psychological concerns merged with an increasingly expansive engagement with art history, leading to the fantastical landscapes and floral paintings for which she is now celebrated. Drawing upon sources as varied as Symbolism, Fauvism, Surrealism and American landscape painting, Hughes has developed a visual language that is unmistakably her own: one in which imagined worlds become vehicles for exploring the complexities of perception, emotion and memory.
Within this remarkable quartet, the present work is devoted to the dandelion, a motif Hughes elevates to monumental scale. Viewed from a dramatically low vantage point, the flower rises above the viewer like a fantastical monument, its oversized seed heads suspended against a kaleidoscopic sky. The effect is simultaneously immersive and disorienting: by enlarging a humble wildflower beyond its natural proportions, Hughes transforms the traditional still life into an expansive pictorial environment.
This conflation of landscape and psychology lies at the heart of Hughes’ practice. The artist has explained, ‘No, I don’t paint from life at all, ever. My works are more about painting than about nature or something in the real world. They always start from playing around with color and shape and texture. The landscape becomes an access point for the viewer, a lot of times.’ (S. Hughes, quoted in I. Alteveer, “Shara Hughes in Conversation”, in Shara Hughes/Landscapes, Rachel Uffner Gallery, 2019, p.15) Landscape, for Hughes, is a language through which emotion, memory and intuition may be explored. She constructs vividly imagined environments in which colour, scale and perspective are liberated from the constraints of reality.