Natalya Hughes' multidisciplinary practice is concerned with decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body and excess. Through painting, textiles, sculpture and installation, her recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between Modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects.
Selected Works
Overview
These Girls of the Studio, 2022
Installation view, Sullivan+Strumpf, Eora/Sydney. Photogrpahy by Simon Hewson.
acrylic on polyester
132 × 163 cm
acrylic on poly
153 × 117 cm
acrylic on poly
117 × 153 cm
acrylic on poly
153 × 117 cm
acrylic on poly, custom made fabric, weights, powder coated steel frame
140 × 116 × 60 cm
gouache and acrylic on cold pressed paper
88 × 100 cm
tufted rug (cotton yarn, backing cloths, adhesive)
85 × 127 cm
hand tufted rug (cotton yarn, primary and backing cloth, tape, adhesive)
132 × 77 cm
Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof (#3/3)
tufted rug (cotton and wool yarn, backing cloths, adhesive)
126 × 155 cm
Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof (#3/3)
Exhibitions
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About
Natalya Hughes
Biography
Natalya Hughes' multidisciplinary practice is concerned with decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body and excess. Through painting, textiles, sculpture and installation, her recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between Modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects.
Using the life and work of major 20th century male artists, Willem de Kooning and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well archival case studies of Sigmund Freud, Hughes seeks to examine society’s ‘problems’ with women and the fraught associations that have ultimately determined them.
In 2023 Hughes presented a major interactive exhibition, The Castle of Tarragindi, at the Children’s Art Centre at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Brisbane. Hughes was awarded the 2022 Michaela and Adrian Fini Fellowship by the Sheila Foundation that supported the creation of an institutional solo exhibition, The Interior, at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane and subsequent national tour. In 2023, she was an Artist in Residence at The State Buildings, Perth. In 2019, she completed the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Open Studio residency. Hughes is the second of five contemporary Australian artists to feature at Open Studio.
Her work was included in the major group exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now (Part 2) at the National Gallery of Australia (2021-22), as well as in other institutional shows at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2019, 2017 and 2012); QUT Art Museum Brisbane (2016); Artspace Sydney (2016); Hazelhurst Regional Gallery (2015); Performance Space (2012); Parliament House Canberra (2014); UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2010); Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2009); and Tarrawarra Museum of Art, VIC (2006).
In 2023, Hughes was awarded the FLOW Watercolour Prize by Wollongong Art Gallery. She has been selected as a finalist in the 2023, 2022 and 2018 Sir John Sulman Prize at Art Gallery of NSW; the National Works on Paper Prize at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in 2018; and the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize at Art Gallery of South Australia. Hughes completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane in 2001 and a PhD in Art Theory at the College of Fine Art (UNSW) in 2009. She currently lives in Brisbane and lectures in Fine Art and Expanded Practice at the Queensland College of Art.
Photography by James Caswell
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