MAKING ART is difficult. Doing it when you’re struggling with an illness you know is going to kill you is a higher level of achievement. “How do I embrace this thing and make it OK, or make myself able to live with it and produce and go on from there? How do I live every day with despair?” wrote painter Hugh Auchincloss Steers after he was diagnosed with HIV at age 25. The answer was: by constantly painting canvases depicting men who are ill, men in partial or complete undress, ambiguously intimate in their private spaces. Steers did this for the remaining seven years of his life, almost up to the day he died: March 1, 1995.
The raw force and beauty of Steers’ figurative painting is on display in a solo exhibition of work not shown previously, at Alexander Gray Associates through July 27th. The Chelsea gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, last exhibited Steers’ work in 2015. In fall 2017, two of the artist’s works were included in AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. In 2015, Visual AIDS, a New York-based organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS awareness through visual art projects, published Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983–1994, a comprehensive look at Steers’ work with accompanying essays, including author Cynthia Carr’s profile of the artist.
