David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Weather Report, an exhibition of new paintings by Shara Hughes. The artist's first New York solo exhibition in six years, the show will be on view at 520 W. 20th St. from September 4 through October 18, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 4 from 6 until 8 PM.

In her newest paintings, Hughes continues to redefine how the medium records—and generates—the experience of being human. These are at the same time some of the most personal and the most far-reaching works she has made to date. Each of the nine large-scale works on view encompasses a world of thought, feeling, self-reflection, and open-ended experimentation. And while thematic connections between the paintings abound, Hughes demonstrates here the fully embodied commitment she brings to each painting as a standalone experience for artist and viewer alike. All the paintings are vertically oriented and sized so that they are at once immersive and intimate.

Over the course of her career, Hughes has increasingly expanded the potential of the landscape genre, creating works that communicate moods, ideas, and other features of inner life which resist easy categorization. Even as elements of the natural world—trees, flowers, water, horizon lines, geological features—occupy a foundational role in her compositions, she allows active brushwork and vivid color to become subjects in their own right, so that each work is an environment where observation, imagination, and emotion blend together in ever new ways. The palpable sense of movement with which Hughes both defines and joins her forms calls attention to the presence of forces that might best be called abstract were they not so tangible, direct, and full of painterly warmth.

MaMa (2025), an eight-foot-tall painting of a forest scene, for instance, is dominated by a luminous field of red, orange, and yellow that cascades down from the sun-like head of a flower anchoring the composition's top edge. Hughes conjures a space full of mysterious depth even as she allows herself to revel in the fully material, non-illusionistic realm of a picture plane, with an encyclopedic array of mark-making approaches and textural details. This visual and material-based breadth is matched by the many moods, some of them seemingly contradictory, that the painting exudes. Violence and calm, intensity and levity, precision and free-flowing invention combine and mix like light and wind meeting in the natural world. A keen observer of such patterns, Hughes, through passionate self-observation, also shows how they provide analogues for the changes and transformations that animate the seasons of human life.

The dance between control and abandon that has animated Hughes's project since the beginning comes into even sharper focus in works like Bigger Person (2024), in which the artist collapses foreground and background and images of trees and grasses are often barely distinguishable from expressive gestures and drips of paint. Here, paint and picture become one interwoven visual field: the work is a picture of the process of painting as much as it is a representation of a landscape. In a similar way, the work is more than merely the record of Hughes's negotiations with her materials, their art historical resonances, the instability of the contemporary world, and herself. It is a generator of feelings, a means by which artist and viewer alike can broaden their understanding of what it means to look out at the world as well as inward toward the invisible—but no less felt—phenomena that give life its personal and interpersonal meaning.

Opening in November 2025, the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Florida will present a mid-career survey, Inside Outside, of Shara Hughes’s work. Hughes (b. 1981, Atlanta, GA) has also  been the subject of solo exhibitions at Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY (2024); Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark (2023); FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2022); Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2021–2022); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2021); Garden Museum, London, England (2021); Aspen Museum of Art, CO (2021); and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Day for Night: New American Realism, Palazzo Barberini, organized by the Aïshti Foundation, Rome, Italy (2024); Open Ended: SFMOMA’s Collection, 1900 to Now, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (ongoing); Being in the World: The Tenth Anniversary of the Long Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2023); Nature humaine – Humaine nature, Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France (2022–2023); America Will BE! Surveying the Contemporary Landscape, Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2019); and Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Denver Art Museum, CO; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others. Hughes lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.