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Artworks
Hugh Steers
Crows, 1988Oil on paper11 1/8 x 13 1/4 in
28.3 x 33.7 cmEHS237In 1988, one year after receiving his positive HIV diagnosis, Hugh Steers painted two compositions that featured crows, mythological harbingers of deaths. These crow works reveal the artist's struggle to...In 1988, one year after receiving his positive HIV diagnosis, Hugh Steers painted two compositions that featured crows, mythological harbingers of deaths. These crow works reveal the artist's struggle to come to terms with his own mortality as he lived life and made art under the specter of AIDS. Indicative of this struggle, Crows features two birds about to alight on a reclining nude. Their vulture-like forms inject an air of menace and violence into the oil sketch—as though, like the eagle from the myth of Prometheus, they are going to strip the flesh from the vulnerable man—and recall the ominous owls and bats of Francisco Goya’s aquatint, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (c. 1799).Provenance
Private collection (acquired directly from the artist)
Publications
Schröder, Barbara and Karen Kelly, eds. Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983-1994. New York: Visual AIDS, 2015, pp. 109, 199.
