Natalya Hughes (b. 1977) works across painting, digital media and installation to explore the role of women in art history. Her practice is concerned with decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body and excess. Recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between Modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects.
Hughes’s work has been exhibited in Australian and international shows such as the 2019 Sunshine Coast Art Prize; the 2018 Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes; ‘Patternation’, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery (2015); ‘An Imprecise Science’, Artspace Sydney (2015); ‘Office Work’, Parliament House Canberra (2014); ‘I Miss You More When it Rains’, Dog Park Project Space, Christchurch (2013); ‘December Letters’, Bushwick NYC (2013); ‘ANIMAL/HUMAN’, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2012); ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, QAG|GOMA, Brisbane (2012); ‘The James Souris Collection’, QAG|GOMA (2011); ‘New Psychedelia’, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2011); ‘Zen to Kawaii: The Japanese Effect’, QUT Art Museum (2010); ‘The Shilo Project’, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2009); ‘Creative Australia and the Ballet Russes’, Victorian Arts Centre (2009); ‘Neo Goth’, UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2008); ‘Too Near Too Far’, Care/ Of Contemporary Art Space, Milan, Italy (2007); ‘Parallel Lives: TarraWarra Painting Biennale’, TarraWarra Museum of Art, VIC (2006); ‘Prime: New Art from Queensland’, QAG|GOMA (2005); ‘Object/Subject’, Museum of Brisbane (2005); ‘A Cut Across’, Plimsoll Gallery, University of TAS (2004); ‘Australian Drawing Biennale’, ANU Drill Hall, Canberra (2004); and ‘2004: Australian Culture Now’, National Gallery of Victoria (2003).
