Louisiana poster with the work, Pop, (2021), by American artist, Shara Hughes (b. 1981). Shara Hughes uses a multitude of techniques and equilibristically references art history in her brightly colored paintings, and is particularly recognized for her invented landscapes.
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The piece Pop came about as a series of large-format paintings. Hughes has allowed different flowers to play a leading role, and in this piece poppies fill the foreground of the canvas and make it difficult to look at the landscape element that seems to lie behind.
The title of the work elegantly plays with the English word for poppy, poppy – and then ‘pop’, which is both popular culture and an art movement that cultivated this very culture. But pop is also the sound of something popping out. Like bud shoots, the poppies that spring up here and there have finally covered the canvas. Pop, pop.
