Challenging Women: Natalya Hughes
Natalya Hughes’ takes on Willem de Kooning’s iconic Woman series with paint and pattern.
Visitors to the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) will be familiar with Willem de Kooning’s Woman V (1952-3), a masterpiece of the national collection. The painting is one from Dutch artist’s celebrated Woman series, completed between 1950 and 1953. De Kooning exhibited the suite of five paintings and a group of works on paper at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1953. At the time, de Kooning’s painterly yet disembodied depictions of an anonymous female figure caused controversy by departing from the abstract imagery that the artist had made his name with. Today, works from this series are considered icons of Modernist painting and hang in major art museums across the globe, including the NGA.
For Australian artist Natalya Hughes, de Kooning’s Woman series is an exemplar of the way in which male artists have traditionally used the female body as a subject to experiment on. Since graduating with First Class Honours from the Queensland University of Technology in 2001, Hughes has produced an ongoing and evolving series of exquisitely detailed paintings and works on paper that deconstruct art historical representations of the female form and dress. The artist has engaged with a diverse range of source material, including Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Leon Bakst’s costume designs for the Ballets Russes and Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of Victorian decadence. More recently, Hughes has turned her attention to depictions of women in canonical examples of late 19th and 20th century art history, from Édouard
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