We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Natalya Hughes / Australia b.1977 / Flaccid Lake 2008 / Oil on linen The James C. Sourris, am, Collection / Gift of James C. Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2010 / Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Natalya Hughes
Natalya HughesFlaccid Lake 2008
Not Currently on Display
Hughes’s interest in the visual pleasure of eye-catching detail is apparent in Flaccid Lake 2008, part of an ongoing series which draws inspiration from the monochromatic drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. His lyrical illustrations of European fin de siècle decadence are the source material for her large black-and-white oil paintings, which depict fragments from skirts, ruffles and underclothes.
In Flaccid Lake, as elsewhere in the artist’s oeuvre, clothing is depicted without wearer, and here these elaborately flouncy fabrics, which still hold the shapes of absent bodies, morph into a mirrored pair of abstract penile forms. These curious shapes are at once abject and attractive. A conversation is taking place that sees a frocked-up nineteenth century lady morph into a flaccid male member and back again, each bowing politely at the other, engaged in a form of wacky social discourse.
Natalya Hughes’s paintings, textiles and installations playfully critique the representation of women in modernist painting. Her use of form and pattern draws attention to the role that women’s bodies play in the rhetoric of modernism that often marginalises the decorative and silences the reality of individual women’s bodies and experiences.
Hughes is an established mid-career artist who is best known as a painter, though she has also applied her distinctive approach to image making to digital animations, as well as installations comprised of custom wallpaper, upholstered furniture, and carpets. Pursuing an interest in the aesthetics of decadence and the feminine, Hughes has built a practice around the sampling and reworking of both Eastern and Western art history references since 2002. The result is part Pop, part Op.
Currently lecturing in art history at the Queensland College of Art, Natalya Hughes graduated from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, in 2001 with Honours in Fine Arts and was awarded a PhD at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW in 2009.