This exhibition brings together Irish painter Paul Hughes and French artist Gérard Stricher, two abstract expressionists united by their bold use of color and their reimagining of nature. Both turn to Giverny as inspiration—not to replicate Monet’s gardens, but to invent their own versions of a place suspended between memory and dream.

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Hughes presents works from his My Giverny series, developed over the last 18 months with an emphasis on new 2025 paintings. Though he has chosen never to visit Giverny itself, he reconstructs its mythic aura through the darker, shifting light of the Irish landscape and what he calls an “imaginary world of Giverny.” His canvases emerge from a tension between physicality and delicacy, abstraction and intimacy; he often paints with both hands at once, as if grappling directly with light and color at the surface of the canvas. His daydreams stretch from imagined conversations with Monet, Pollock, Motherwell, and Turner to meditations on the Nordic concept of Glósóli: “the glow of the sun, the glow of the soul.”

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Stricher, meanwhile, works from the very soil of Giverny’s neighboring Vexin landscape. Yet his paintings resist direct homage. They erupt with sweeping strokes, thick impasto, and raw physical energy, transforming the pastoral into an arena of pure chromatic force. For Stricher, nature is the wellspring of emotion: “Its colors are my breath, my inspiration, my joy, my solace, and my peace.” Painting is inseparable from life itself—each canvas a new reality, like a single note of music transforming silence into presence.

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​Together, Hughes and Stricher affirm painting as a physical and transformative act, capable of transfiguring memory and imagination into luminous, raw, and dreamlike experience.