Kunstmuseum Luzern – författare

Sonja Sekula (1918-63) was born and educated in Lucerne, Switzerland, but emigrated to the United States with her parents in 1936. In 1941, she began studying art at the Arts Students League in New York and made the acquaintance of Andre Breton and his friends among the surrealists. Her automatic paintings and texts soon captured the interest of Peggy Guggenheim and Marcel Duchamp. In 1943, she was invited for the first time to show her work at Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery, and, throughout the late 1940s, she was also featured in solo and group exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery. However, mental health problems dogged her throughout her life, and she returned to Switzerland for treatment in 1955, where she committed suicide in 1963. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Sekula's art in context of the work of her friends and fellow artists from the period. Richly illustrated, it offers a chance to rediscover an immensely talented artist who has been unjustly neglected.

Shara Hughes (b. Atlanta, 1981; lives and works in New York) describes her pictures and drawings as psychological or invented landscapes. Her cliff coasts, river valleys, sunsets, and lush gardens, often framed by abstract patterns, might be the settings of fairy tales or scenes from paradise. As the New Yorker put it, the paintings “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds”. Wielding oil paint, brushes, spatulas, and spray cans, the artist celebrates painting itself, not infrequently quoting the masters of past eras._x000D__x000D_Shara Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her most recent solo exhibitions are currently on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. In 2021, she had shows at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Garden Museum, London; the Aspen Museum of Art, colourado; and at Le Consortium, Dijon.