1963-1995
208 W. 23RD ST.
HUNGER OF MEMORY - GUY TREBAY ON HUGH STEERS, VILLAGE VOICE, 1995
VIEW THE WORK OF HUGH STEERS
NY TIMES OBITUARY OF HUGH STEERS
Hugh Auchincloss Steers was an American figurative painter. He was born in Washington and studied at Yale; his style was a blend of dreamlike allegory and Expressionist realism, mixed with an erudite sense of art history that kept his work anchored within a pantheon of Western art. Towards the end of his life his work increasingly focused on AIDS, depicting many single male figures, almost nude or in women's clothes, isolated in dark rooms. In a final series at the Richard Anderson Gallery, he included a recurrent male figure which he referred to as a self-portrait. The character was dressed in a white hospital gown and white high heels and entered the lives of other figures as both a guardian and an avenging angel. Steers' work remains in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Denver Art Museum. He died at age 32.