Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983–1994

The complete paintings of an artist who died at thirty-two, and the record of a figurative practice that insisted on tenderness at the height of the AIDS crisis.

Published by Visual AIDS in 2015 and compiled by Wheelock Whitney, the volume reproduces every painting Hugh Steers made between 1983 and 1994 alongside an account of his life, with texts by the journalist Cynthia Carr, the novelist Dale Peck and the art historian James Smalls, in a design by Bethany Johns. The chronology carries him from student work at Yale to the allegorical hospital rooms, bathtubs, slanted artificial light and paired male figures of the late 1980s and early 1990s — pictures made when representational painting was thoroughly unfashionable and the subject matter more so.

Steers (1962–1995) graduated cum laude from Yale in 1985 and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; he was diagnosed with HIV in 1987 and died of AIDS-related illness at thirty-two. Caregiving between men is his recurring subject, handled without either sentiment or protest-poster directness. Visual AIDS, which maintains the archive of artists lost to AIDS and supports HIV-positive artists, published the book; the Yale University Art Gallery holds three of his paintings.