Hugh Auchincloss Steers was a painter whose work is in the Whitney Museum of American, the Walker Center, and the Denver Museum.
Background
Steers was born in 1962 to Nina Gore Auchincloss and Newton Steers. Steers was the grandson of Hugh D. Auchincloss and Nina Gore and the great-grandson of Thomas Gore. His mother was the half-sister of writer Gore Vidal and a stepsister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Education
He attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut and graduated from Yale University in 1985. He later attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, graduating in 1991. The wedding was attended by Hugh Doctorate. Auchincloss, Janet Auchincloss, Jackie Kennedy, Renata Adler, Beatrice Straight, and Peter Cookson.
Career
He died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome at the age of 32. Steers had two brothers, Ivan Steers and Burr Steers, the filmmaker. In 1989, Steers received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship and had his first solo exhibition.
He went on to exhibit his work in over 30 shows across the United States and Italy.
Steers" work, primarily figurative painting, is featured in the Whitney Museum of American, the Walker Center, and the Denver Museum. He painted in a style that mixed dreamlike allegory with Expressionist-tinged realism and incorporated art history references.
In the 1990s, his work increasingly dealt with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and many of his paintings showed male figures alone nearly nude or clothed in women"s attire. Steers also depicted pairs of men bathing, dressing each other, and embracing.
In his final works, he painted a self-portrait of a man dressed in a white hospital gown with white high heels.
The figure is shown entering the lives of other characters as both an avenging and a guardian angel. A comprehensive monographic catalogue of Steers’ work was published by Visual Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome in 2015. Steers was openly gay and died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome related complications in 1995 at the age of 32.
Drawing Center, New York (1987)
Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1988)
Denver Museum, Denver, Colorado (1991)
Midtown Galleries, New York (1992)
Richard Anderson, New York (1992)
New Museum of Contemporary (1994)
Cadmus, Steers, Warhol (2012)
Basel Miami Beach (2012)
Kabinett Basel Miami Beach History, Painting (2012)
Hugh Steers, Alexander Gray Associates (2013)
Hugh Steers, Whitney Museum of American (2013)
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome America, Tacoma Museum (2015)
Hugh Steers" Day Light Alexander Gray Associates (2015).