SHARA HUGHES

ALBERTINA MUSEUM, VIENNA

Fields of flowers, enchanted forests, and mysterious waterfalls seem as if born of a wild fever dream: gigantic flowers weave their way toward the sky like trees, plants mutate into things familiar seeming yet unknown, blazing sunsets reflect upon the water, stars glow on the horizon and bathe the landscape in their supernatural light.

Shara Hughes (*1981) is ranks among the outstanding and internationally acclaimed artists in contemporary art today. With the exhibition Sink In, the ALBERTINA Museum presents the American artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Austria. For around a decade, landscapes have occupied a central place in 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.

The exhibition is on view from 9 October 2026 until 28 February 2027.