Natalya Hughes

All of Your Women and Some of Mine by Natalya Hughes features paintings, prints and furnishings that playfully critique the representation of women in Modernist painting. Her work draws attention to the role that women’s bodies play in the rhetoric of modernism as subservient objects of desire, removed from the reality of individual women’s bodies and experiences. As Hughes comments: ‘The installation draws attention to the way “the female form”, as an abstract concept, is frequently deployed in white, male, heteronormative modernist painting practices.’ Through excessive patterning and ornament, Hughes creates a counter canon – one that is feminised, decorative, gendered and embodied.

Hughes’ work has been included in group exhibitions including Patternation at Hazlehurst Regional Gallery in Sydney in 2015 and Contemporary Australia: Women at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2012. She had has recent solo exhibitions in Brisbane and Sydney including Girls Girls Girls at Firstdraft in Sydney in 2015.