Sara Hughes

b. 1971 Canada/New Zealand
Lives in Auckland

Active since the early 2000s, Sara Hughes has created a rich artistic language centred in geometric abstraction. Hughes is well established and highly regarded throughout Australasia, with an extensive exhibition history across a broad range of public and private contexts. She has created work on a remarkable range of scales, from intimate paintings to immersive installations and large-scale public art projects.

Hughes has developed a practice that melds conceptual ideas with a complex approach to colour and composition. Her paintings have often featured dazzling geometry and bright palettes, creating striking visual effects that seem to hold an irrepressible energy and movement. Her recent work has explored time and light, and how our days are defined by these cyclical rhythms. She articulates this through a recreation of her own experiences of changing light, working in layers of colour over her canvases to evoke light from specific moments in time.

Hughes has won numerous awards and residencies, including the Francis Hodgkins Fellowship in 2003, the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2007, and the Creative New Zealand Berlin Visual Artists Residency at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in 2008/09. She has undertaken a number of high-profile public commissions, including Magma, a large 500sqm painting in Auckland created in 2017, as well as a series of striking outdoor works for the re-opening of Cathedral Square in the centre of Christchurch, 2014-16. Her installation for the New Zealand International Convention Centre in Auckland is the largest integrated public artwork in New Zealand. Her work is held in many significant public and private collections, including the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Te Papa Tongarewa, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Hughes holds BFA and MFA degrees in painting from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Her work has featured in a wide range of publications, including Art in America, Artlink, Art in Australia, and Monument. She is included in Warrick Brown and Liz Caughey's anthologies on New Zealand art and her works is the subject of the book Sara Hughes: Feedback Runaway (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2009).

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Sara Hughes since 2004.

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These new paintings have developed out of an intense three year period working on my largest public art project to date for the New Zealand International Convention Centre. A work on 550 glass panels that covers 2400 sq m. Thinking of what it means to be from this land and of this place challenged my thinking and pushed me into new territory. It made me delve back into my past, to remember my childhood growing up in the far north of New Zealand. It was the overwhelming sense of light and colour that was imprinted on my memory. I have clear recollections of the enormity of the bush when I was young and collecting as many types of green leaves and foliage as I could. I would try to catalogue them but when I came back the next day they had faded and changed so I would start again. - Sara Hughes