Acclaimed Brisbane-based artist Natalya Hughes is opening a major new exhibition which puts a female centred spin on Freud’s psychoanalytic couch. Gallery visitors are invited to dive into the depths of their psyche with a psychoanalysis-inspired exhibition titled The Interior at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane from 30 July to 1 October 2022.
It is one of several major milestones this year for Natalya who is currently a Finalist in the Sulman Prize and will also in September unveil a solo survey at Sydney’s Sullivan and Strumph Gallery. Natalya is also the prestigious 2022 recipient of the Michela & Adrian Fini Artist Fellowship, awarded by Sheila Foundation. It is the perfect time to shine a light on this highly respected Brisbane artist exploring one of the most important issues of our time.
Drawing on the gendered power dynamics between public and private space, the exhibition presents a playfully exaggerated consultation room. Combining sculptural seating, richly patterned soft furnishings, uncanny objects d’art, and a hand-painted mural, The Interior creates a stimulating space to unpack our collective and unconscious biases.
Natalya Hughes, one of Australia’s most exciting mid-career artists, is known for her explorations of 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. In The Interior Hughes builds on her interest in the role of women and their historical absence from positions of power.
The exhibition asks, “Can we use the talking cure to solve society’s ‘problem’ with women?” The custom-made couches that dot the gallery, take their lush contours from the shapes of the female body, and their detailed upholstery sees motifs of eyes, rats, and snakes taken from patient case studies from the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Audiences are invited to recline and be enveloped, soothed, and held by the furniture’s womanly forms while taking turns playing analyst and patient. With this bodily encounter The Interior creates a space where the existence of
women can be reimagined on different terms in the ‘post-Me Too’ world.
About the exhibition the artist said, “In this work I wanted to explore something of society’s unease with women; I am interested in the representation of women, how we are conceptualized, and why expectations of us are so slow to shift. Freud founded psychoanalysis – a theory which informs much of my art making. Women are also problematic within his work, but psychoanalysis provides a useful framework for dealing with problems around gender and what we value. By mining Freud’s references and imagery of women, I seek to see what they might offer or reveal, in
order to more equitably reimagine the idea of ‘woman.’”
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