'Art should be more playful' : Shara Hughes, Austin Eddy invite us to fruit stand

Married couple opens first collaborative exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber showroom in Seoul.

Installation view of "Roots n’ Fruits," presented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Seoul (Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Shara Hughes, Austin Eddy)

Brooklyn-based artists Shara Hughes and Austin Eddy, partners since 2012 and married for the past two years, present their first-ever collaboration in Seoul. Centered on the theme of fruit, the show offers a glimpse into the couple’s inner world through playful, yet introspective imagery.

While their works appear similar due to the shared theme, they vary in terms of form and colors the artists used. Their paintings on display here speak about the artists themselves, but the stories deal with subjects in different aspects.

They titled the exhibition “Roots n’ Fruits,” which is being held at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s showroom in Seoul located in Hannam-dong.

The gallery space is decorated with green stripes as a reference to fruit stands in France, the artists said.

Shara Hughes (right) and Austin Eddy pose for a photo at the "Roots n’ Fruits" exhibition on Wednesday in Seoul. (Park Yuna/The Korea Herald)

“It is a sort of a way of asking people to come in and enjoy, as if you were sort of coming into a fruit stand,” Hughes said Wednesday. Eddy added that they wanted art to become more playful and fun, rather than too academic and heavy.

Hughes' “Just Peachy” painting shows a trunk, branch and foliage transformed into a red-green table of lines, creating the illusion of grass and leaves. The peach tree can be seen as herself — like a self-portrait — the artist said, adding that she is from Georgia, the US state famous for its affinity for peaches.

“The tree is speaking about how you grow and how you change,” she said. “It is almost thinking about where your roots come from. And how it (a tree) grows, gets abstracted and changes throughout your life.”

Eddy’s painting of fruit in “All Great And Precious Things” features cherries, bananas, pears and apples all together, showing different stages of decay. Unlike Hughes, he emphasizes demarcation in form and color.

“You have this rotting banana and then these two cherries — one is young and the other one is quite old,” Eddy said. "In essence, it is a larger conversation about time and sort of addressing selfness."

An apple is horizontally cut in half in the painting “Vulnerable,” created with watercolors, gouache and colored pencil, as though vulnerability is revealed with inner portions of the apple exposed.

“It is like that feeling when you expose yourself, sort of like me in this interview,” Eddy said.

The European gallery has operated its showroom in Seoul since last year in collaboration with P21, a homegrown gallery in Seoul, after joining Frieze Seoul beginning in 2022. Managing director Andreas Grimm said the gallery is keeping an eye on the city as another art hub in Asia.

“We have been really welcomed here and wanted to be looked as a guest here. For us, it is nice to have the small space,” he said. “We are very open, and we are always very flexible with a lot of ideas. We will go with the flow, and we will see what the future brings, and the momentum is something important.”

The exhibition runs through May 17 at the showroom located at 74 Hoenamu-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul.