Work Dance I, 1988
Oil on Canvas, 24" x 30"
Born in 1938 in Forrest City, Arkansas, Manuel Hughes received his B.A. in 1965 from the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is largely a still life painter, and his first series of paintings contained images of draped fabrics. In the late 1980s he began to paint still lifes of household objects he had collected over many years. Hughes focuses on the details of the objects and formal relationships between the pieces in each arrangement. In his straightforward portrayal of tools and other mundane items set against nondescript backgrounds, the artist asks the viewer to share in the pleasure he takes in each quirky and unique form.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.