Contemporary Australia: Women

85 Natalya Hughes makes impeccable paintings and works on paper that reflect an ongoing interest in the aesthetics of decadence. For ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, Hughes has created a perverted parlour room. This twisted version of a domestic space — beautiful from afar — is, on closer inspection, overflowing with icky imagery. The After Party 2012 is an immersive environment overrun with discomforting ornamentation — wallpaper features a colony of purple beavers gnawing at one another; paintings taunt us with suggestive forms and kooky patternation; and a bizarre dining suite sits plumply at its heart, both engorged and engaging. Drawing from art history and pop culture alike, crossed with the odd rococo flourish and intermingled with squidgy bodily references, Hughes moves seamlessly between florid, funny and out‑and-out gross. The title refers to Judy Chicago’s controversial megawork, The dinner party 1974–79, an ambitious piece that captured the time with laser-like precision. Created at the height of the feminist movement — but when Feminism was still a dirty word — The dinner party honoured some of Western civilisation’s most significant but overlooked women. Here Hughes riffs on the iconic work and, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, later criticism of it. While acknowledging its legacy, she also takes the piss out of theories associated with feminist art of that time — in particular, ‘central-core imagery’, which asserted that women artists unconsciously use vaginal iconography as a metaphor for the essence of womanhood. Hotly debated throughout the 1970s and 80s, the idea was dismissed by many as essentialist. Hughes’s witty homage is riddled with euphemism — hence the presence of beavers, innumerable pink bits and tacos. Hughes’s preoccupation with the body could easily be construed here as mouths or vaginas, or even a combination of the two — a Freudian vagina dentata. While Hughes would rightly reject such an interpretation as reductive, the larger idea remains. Given its scale, The After Party strongly references bodies, is inward to the point of being hermetic and resists interpretation — though one can see its combination of humour, visual intelligence and physicality. Nonetheless, as a perverse domestic space The After Party facilitates conversations between past and present: intermingling art historical and theoretical references, connecting with discussions about the body and the abject in art, and grounding it all in lived reality. Hughes seems to acknowledge the confusion of ‘what came next’ after Feminism’s second and third waves: understandings of Feminism are much more complicated today — there is no single, unitary movement any more than there is a timeless, universal ‘woman’. Hughes dips her toe into these complex waters with a work that playfully engages with feminist histories, as much as it builds on the idiosyncratic visual language she has accumulated over more than ten years. Hughes’s content remains consistent: sources are drawn from images that are already highly stylised and partially abstracted versions of the figurative, which she then deconstructs, reconfigures and rewrites. Following a method of elimination, Hughes sees how far her coded forms can be reduced before the content is lost. Here she teeters on the point of no return — the decorative excesses previously held in check by expanses of flat colour have instead been reproduced atop florid gyrating backgrounds. The whole work is a full-on defiance of logic: the artist leaves the viewer to interpret her parlour room of excess, stuck in a never-ending loop of purple beavers, fleshy protuberances and eggy rocaille details. The After Party thus marks something of a stylistic departure: her compositional style — which swings between figuration, abstraction, technology and tradition — has been expanded exponentially, and into three-dimensions. Typically eclectic, Hughes’s paintings mash together a mind-boggling array of referents. Taco Corsage 2011 for instance, features a bandy-legged taco, proudly bearing a neatly coiled arrangement of raw sausages. Its stockinged legs have been lifted from Hans Bellmer’s La poupée 1934–35, while the squidgy pink sections, vaguely vulval and suggestive, are in fact carefully reproduced drapes and folds from the billowing skirts of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s central figure in The swing c.1767. This celebrated painting, now considered Natalya Hughes Australia b.1977 Digital study for Left Delaunay 2011–12 Acrylic polymer on linen 66 x 46cm Natalya Hughes Natalya Hughes The After Party