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 / Two Sisters 2006 / Oil on Belgian linen / Purchased 2006 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Natalya Hughes
Natalya HughesTwo sisters 2006
Not Currently on Display
Natalya Hughes’s Two sisters 2006 draws on the lush imagery of ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Edo period Japan (1615–1868) and art nouveau designs of nineteenth-century British artist Aubrey Beardsley to portray human bodies. Hughes implies their presence by playing on our familiarity with the way volumes of cloth are depicted through shape, line and shifting pattern.
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.