In an age often described as aggressively polarised, the current exhibition of paintings and prints by Abi Box and Phoebe Hughes in the Rick Fairies Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art is a welcome antidote.

Close By: Abi Box and Phoebe Hughes celebrates difference and demonstrates the rich benefits of contrasting points of view.

The exhibit, on view until January 10, 2026, embodies the spirit of collaboration even though the paintings represent two very different studio practices. Installed as it is, with the paintings by each artist commingling, a dialogue ensues that highlights the visual tension that is complementing rather than overpowering.

Box’s luxurious colours and visual textures are interspersed with Hughes’s meticulous rendering of foliage, leaving the viewer to make connections and perceive parallels.

Close By, then, suggests this collaboration, among other things. Adjacent paintings and prints exchange colours like neighbours leaning across the back fence. With one such pairing, Box’s Her Lungs I nestles against Hughes’s Chasing the Wind.

Both depict foliage, the broad leaves and deep hues of Bermuda’s landscape, but Hughes’s tightly focused banana leaves contrast with Box’s dynamic mark-making. One work is abstracted and suggestive, the other precise and representational. Together, they sharpen the viewer’s perception of each.

Both artists are well-known to visitors of Bermuda’s art galleries and museums. Hughes won Masterworks’ People’s Choice Award at the annual Charman Prize exhibition in 2022, as well as the Creative and Distinction Award and Collection Prize in 2024. Box, for her part, has had her work selected for the Bermuda Biennial several times, has exhibited widely in the UK, and has held residencies in Peru, North Wales, Switzerland, and France.

The current exhibit centres around the theme of foliage, its colours and forms, present in the Bermudian lush, layered landscape. Separately, though, each artist explores a spectrum of closeness, and extends the transitions between one painting and the next.

Even in her loosest abstract paintings and monoprints, Box alternates between the intimacy of a close-up still-life and the distance sweeping garden view. In Bronze Cut II, high contrast colours populate a patterned surface. Within this one work, the viewer is pulled between a flattened, vibrating surface and a sweeping scene of tropical flora.

Box described the careful consideration of the exhibit’s installation during a recent conversation in the gallery. During an age driven by technology and, increasingly, artificial intelligence, Box sees the imperative for interaction as a resounding need in the contemporary world.

Communication — between the viewer and the paintings and between the paintings as they hang — allows for an active participation by visitors to the gallery. Alone, the paintings and prints provide plenty for individual contemplation, but together they deliver an added dimension.

Take, for example, Hughes’ Beneath the Same Sky. One of her larger oil compositions, its central placement encourages extended contemplation both in relation to the adjacent works and individually.

Here again, Hughes shows us both proximity and distance. Even though finished in a high degree of resolution of smooth, flowing blues, the foreground yields to ambiguity due to its closeness. (Hughes, in a recent discussion in front of the painting, identified this foreground area as the hood of a car, a mechanical form that, due to the close focus, appears like a natural one, like a pool of water.) Behind these blues, the more identifiable distance contrasts with emerging frond-like forms. Contrasts of colour, texture, and field give the viewer the choice of how to focus.

Placed beside Box’s much smaller oil pastel, titled Foliage Study II, Beneath the Same Sky also reaches beyond its frame. The blues make connections to be sure, but so does the texture and the indication of proximate form. The two compositions are held in an exchange, and seeing them together only augments the experience.

Hughes now divides her time between Bermuda and Bali, and in both locations concentrates on the natural forms embedded in landscapes, often emphasising enhanced hues with darkened surrounding space.

After graduating from the University of the Arts London, Hughes initially focused on both figurative and portrait painting, and there is a portrait-like quality even in these paintings of Bermudian foliage, where the isolation of plants, carefully interpreted, is set against a simple background.

This is certainly the case with Last Night I Dreamt of Summer, where red bromeliad plants fill the frame and block out all but a slice of the green background.

Close By also includes figurative paintings from both artists. One by Hughes is Night Watch, which depicts a group of figures sitting beachside in the dark, with the only description resulting from the red glow that a nearby, off-scene bonfire casts over their forms. Almost completely subsumed in darkness, the crimson highlights evoke the character of a night setting in a somewhat novel study of island life.

Nearby, Box exhibits a figurative work, Starfish, creating another conversation with the neighbouring painting. The darkness of Hughes’s beach scene is contrasted by these figures bathed in light, caught in a moment of informal interaction. Box shows this through the postures of the figures, not a physical description, retaining the vibrating colours and synthesised forms.

The painted boundary on the left side of Starfish is a device Box commonly uses, creating a frame within a frame. Elsewhere, the border may result from a shift in colour at the canvas edge, but here it more dramatically sets off the brightness of the scene.

If the viewer needs further convincing about the intentionality of the visual communication between the paintings, one might stand back and consider how this work would fare if it had been installed on the opposite side of Hughes’s Night Watch.

The interaction between the works is certainly not obvious and was not considered until the process of installing the galleries. Nevertheless, the visual exchanges highlight a genuine commitment to collaboration, one that feels timely not only for the arts but for the broader cultural moment.