The Painter (After Kirchner)
Natalya Hughes
- Sitters: Self-Portrait
- Medium: Acrylic on Cotton
- Dimensions: 117cm x 153cm
- Representation: Milani Gallery, Brisbane and Sullivan and Strumpf, Sydney.
About the artist and artwork
Natalya Hughes is a Brisbane based artist who works in painting, sculpture and installation. She teaches at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and her practice is mainly focussed on 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
This self-portrait is from a series of work exploring the output of the German expressionist painter, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Speaking of the portrait Hughes says ‘where previously I have attended to Kirchner’s paintings of young female muses, in this work I have painted myself into Kirchner’s self portrait Der Maler (The Painter).’
Like other works in the series, this work combines Kirchner’s expressionist painting technique with a repetitive decorative language (drawn from his later collaborations with female craftswomen).
Here, as elsewhere, Hughes is interested in subverting the expectations of the revered male artist and female muse.
