NATALYA HUGHES Maybe I Was Painting The Woman In Me 5 - 28 March 2020
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NATALYA HUGHES
Maybe I Was Painting The Woman In
Me
5 - 28 March 2020
NATALYA HUGHES
MAYBE I WAS PAINTING THE WOMAN IN ME
5 — 28 March, 2020
MILANI GALLERY
270 Montague Road West End, Brisbane 4101 +61 7 3846 6046
The female more than the male, is prey to the species. Humanity has always tried to escape
from its species’ destiny; with the invention of the tool, maintenance of life became activity
and project for man, while motherhood left woman riveted to her body like the animal.
— Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
The landscape is in the Woman and there is Woman in the landscapes.
— Willem de Kooning, 1953
Since the birth of her daughter Natalya Hughes has been repainting Willem de Kooning’s Woman series
from the early 1950s. For Hughes this sustained engagement with these fraught, iconic figures of
modern art is a means of attending to the body, of thinking through what it means when there’s a body
on the line. Especially the body of a woman. But it is important to her project that it is not just the
woman’s body at stake here, that these paintings hinge on another body: the body of the artist, de
Kooning’s body, which is manifestly there in the mordant, often frantic brushstrokes. He took more than
two years to paint Woman I 1950–52, working and reworking the canvas in multiple iterations until the
painting came undone, he scrubbed it and began again. That painting, and all the paintings in the
series, is as much a record of his sustained, physical engagement with paint and surface as it is an
image of Woman, as he might like to have it, or as Hughes insists, a woman.
The images of broad, looming figures that define de Kooning’s Woman series came at
the apex of his expressionism — and the apex of abstract expressionism more broadly;
Jackson Pollock’s spread in Life magazine was published in 1949, famously making explicit the
body’s role in both the logic and making of his drip paintings. The women in de Kooning’s
cubist constructions of the 1940s are elegant, almost remote. They are more careful in their
abstraction, cerebral rather than physical. The idea that women’s bodies have been co-opted
as occasions of male genius is by now well established, both in feminist art practice and
feminist art history. This is how Rozika Parker and Griselda Pollock put it in 1981:
As female nude, woman is body, is nature opposed to male culture, which, in turn, is
represented by the very act of transforming nature, that is, the female model or motif, into the
ordered forms and colour of a cultural artefact, a work of art.
While the state of dress of de Kooning’s 1950s women is at times ambiguous, the
paintings operate more as nude than portrait. In Woman III 1953, for example, a line bifurcates
her thighs suggesting the hem of a skirt, but, as in all the paintings, her breasts are explicitly
delineated in thick, rudimentary lines, and a crude tringle signals her pudenda. In Pollock and
Parker’s view the artist asserts himself over woman through the transfiguration of her living
body into the still, painted image of symbolic importance. The famous nudes of the canon —
I’m thinking of Ingres, Titian, Botticelli, even Manet — share a certain still austerity with the
earlier de Kooning women. This is gone by the 1950s. Woman V 1952-53, hacked out largely
in broad, raw strikes of pink and red paint, is closer to Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef (Flayed
Ox) 1655 via Soutine, than Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque 1814 or Manet’s Olympia 1865. His
1950s women aren’t constrained in form and de Kooning’s body is no longer sheltered — so
fully — by culture.
This seems to have caused de Kooning some anguish. It is as if the more his work
came to hinge on his own unfettered, bodily encounter with the surface, the more he needed
the women he painted to devolve into corporeality. At the same time as his marks and the body
they register complicate the old binary terms of modern, transcendental subjectivity, he worked
to maintain that very balance: mind-body, culture-nature, man-woman. Which is to say, as his
body, the body of the artist, decidedly entered the scene of representation, de Kooning needed
to make woman more body than ever. The women he produces in this period are anonymous,
frequently referred to as grotesque; de Kooning himself said: “I prefer the grotesque. It’s more
joyous.” They are more breast and bulk than anything else, their lipless mouths, bared teeth
and outsized eyes crowd their diminutive heads.
For me the paintings aren’t sexist; they’re sexy—luscious, fleshy, wild life.
— Jerry Saltz to Mark Stevens, 2011
Who would you have him paint, Margaret Mead? … Calling de Kooning misogynist is
simpleminded. It’s for the finger waggers.
— Mark Stevens to Jerry Saltz, 2011
Discontent with the role the women play in de Kooning’s paintings, Hughes has been repainting
this series in her own distinctive style, blending abstraction, figuration and decorative patterning
to, as she puts it, “understand them and bring them into my own visual language, sympathetic
to their status in the history of painting.” The figures remain familiar, but the coarse, painterly
expressionism is superseded by Hughes’ clean, strategically ornamental vernacular. She
meticulously reconstructs de Kooning’s women using fragments of designs either sourced
from, or based on, 1950s fabrics — designs contemporary to the creation of the original
paintings. This strategy works on the two bodies of de Kooning’s paintings in distinct ways: de
Kooning is exiled and the woman’s representation transformed, made starker in the remaking
Hughes’ interest in the Woman series is sustained, at least in part, by the uneasy
power of the figures in the de Kooning paintings. Her project here is not to rescue them, but to
bring them to the fore of our consideration. Down to the “sex doll” mouth in Woman 6 2019
and horrific mirrored grin in Woman With Electric Bicycle 2020, Hughes carefully retains both
the iconography and forms of the de Kooning paintings, but forces a more direct confrontation
with the women. De Kooning is so thoroughly inscribed in his paintings’ gestural abstraction
that the viewer registers him, his strength and energy, as primary. In three paintings — Woman
With Electric Bicycle, and two smaller canvases – Hughes allows the two forms of abstraction
to tussle, layering her polished patterns over loose de Kooning-esque brush strokes. But for
the most part she displaces this element of the original works to a number of tongue-in-cheek
“gesture” paintings – paintings of photoshop generated squiggles. Stripping out de Kooning's
marks but leaving in place the basic armature of his figuration, Hughes deprives the viewer of
the opportunity to be swept up by the artist’s corporeal presence, asking that we attend with
far greater focus to the women themselves.
The strange disjuncture between the crisp, cheerful, carefully delineated
shapes that comprise Hughes’ women and the overall effect of their imposing figures
compels us to contend with them, and to a certain extent, on their terms. Constructing
them from the fragments of ‘50s fabric she deliberately uses a visual language
associated with women’s clothing and the domestic – curtains, wallpaper, table cloths,
etc. Limited though it was, she rebuilds de Kooning’s women from the dominion of their
own power, drawing those derided visual systems (pattern, the decorative) into the
hallowed sphere of mid-century abstraction, a famously masculinist enterprise.
Two Women’s Torsos (Off With Their Heads!) 2019-2020, is the most
challenging work in the show. Its source image was made in the summer of 1952, while
de Kooning holidayed in East Hampton producing a number of pastels, including Two
Women’s Torsos 1952. In Hughes’ version the composite forms of two headless bodies
seem to tear through stylish wall paper of spiralling rectilinear shapes. The original is
violently fragmented, de Kooning’s cubist roots apparent. The figure on the right has
suffered a sever below the knees; in Hughes’ painting we see this figure’s lower left leg
hanging, a slice of delicate pink, scarcely attached. A segment of design comprised of
orange and burgundy triangles similarly floats free of the body to the left, where the
same patterning makes up parts of both leg and torso. These amputations are
emphasised by Hughes’s clean lines, acting as surrogates for the women’s decapitated
heads. Quoting de Kooning back to himself, Hughes makes us see them as maimed.When the abstract artist grows tired, he becomes an interior decorator.
— Clement Greenberg, 1941
The work in Maybe I was painting the woman In me is serious and critical, but it is also
searingly funny. Intent on making her women comfortable, Hughes has introduced furniture into the
work, something she has done previously, including for The After Party, her 2012 installation for
Contemporary Australia: Women at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art. The After
Party was a “perverted parlour room” involving heavily patterned wallpaper – badgers, tacos and fleshy,
labial blooms – and a dinner table, upholstered and over-stuffed. In this show, a number of the paintings
are displayed on the floor, propped up on bronzed, double ended dildos (à la Lynda Benglis’ 1974
Artforum advertisement) like the feet of clawfoot tubs. She has also had two bronzey stands fabricated,
inspired by 1950s magazine racks. Free standing, each holds a painting, precise and incisive, behind
which is affixed a textile panel. Woman IV (Eileen from Kings Point) 2019, named for Hughes’ paternal
grandmother, is backed with a quartered patchwork stretched taught, but from which protrude two
impressively pendulous forms. Weighted with casts scaled to Hughes’ own breasts, they hit the ground
like balled fists. The verso of Woman VI (Harmony) 2019 is a de Kooning woman as quilt, and cushion,
her exaggerated breasts are stuffed, pillowy, carefully supported by the structure of the stand like an
underwire.
If Hughes’ intervenes in the bodies of de Kooning’s Woman series —making confrontations
with the bodies of the women and distancing de Kooning’s body – she also makes us attentive to our
own bodies, and our bodies as relational. These soft, sculptural forms stand to meet us. They are
seductive or mildly imposing, but either way they body forth a kind of encounter. In this element of the
work Hughes draws from the lessons of post-minimalism, making this explicit in her rude versions of
Benglis’ knots. As if one of the photoshopped scrawls from the “gesture” paintings has come to life, in
Gesture (Sausage) 3 2020 a long, stuffed fabric tube tipped with a bronze dildo jumps from the wall like
Eva Hesse’s Hang Up 1966, reaching out to the viewer as if to catch them.
Jacqueline Chlanda, March 2020Gesture (Sausage) 3 2020 Custom made fabric, stuffing, plaster and acrylic paint. Dimensions variable. Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gesture 4 2019 Acrylic on ply 41 x 31cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gestural Body Painting 2020 Acrylic on polyester 156 x 117cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gesture 5 2019 Acrylic on ply 50 x 40cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Maybe I Was Painting the Woman In Me installation view Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Black and White Gesture Painting 2019 Acrylic on polyester 136 x 117cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gesture (Sausage) 2 2020 Custom made fabric, stuffing and acrylic paint. Dimensions variable. Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Sincere Large Scale Gesture Painting 2019-2020 Acrylic on polyester 160 x 160cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Maybe I Was Painting the Woman In Me Installation View Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gesture 3 2019 Acrylic on ply 30 x 25cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gesture 1 2019 Acrylic on ply 46 x 40cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Maybe I Was Painting the Woman In Me installation view Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gesture (Sausage) 1 2020 Custom made fabric, stuffing, plaster and acrylic paint. Dimensions variable. Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Gesture 2 2019 Acrylic on ply 31 x 23cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 1-6 2020 Cyanotype prints 76 x 56cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Black and White Gesture Painting 2019, installation view Acrylic on polyester 136 x 117cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 4 (Eileen from Kings Point) 2019 Acrylic on poly, custom made fabric, weights, powder coated steel frame 149 x 116 x ?c, (irreg., dimensions variable) Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 4 (Eileen from Kings Point) 2019, installation view Acrylic on poly, custom made fabric, weights, powder coated steel frame 149 x 116 x ?c, (irreg., dimensions variable). Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 2 (Pam from the Gold Coast) 2018 Acrylic on poly 150 x 109cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Two Women Still Life 2020 Acrylic on poly 45.7 x Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Maybe I Was Painting the Woman In Me installation view Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman with Electric Bicycle 2019-2020 Acrylic on poly 194.3 x 124.5cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 5 (Pacharintra from Engadine) 2018-2019 Acrylic on poly 154 x 114cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Relief Gesture 1 2019 Custom Fabric 47 x 47cm (dimensions variable) Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 6 (Harmony) 2019 Acrylic on poly, custom made fabric and powder coated steel frame 176 x 114 x 2.5cm. Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Maybe I Was Painting the Woman In Me installation view Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 1 (Me from here) 2018-2019 Acrylic on poly 193 x 147cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Two Women IV 2020 Acrylic on poly 40 x 50cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 6 (Harmony) 2019, installation view Acrylic on poly, custom made fabric and powder coated steel frame 176 x 114 x 2.5cm. Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Two Women’s Torsos (Off with theirs heads!) 2019-2020 Acrylic on poly 200 x 254cm Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Maybe I Was Painting the Woman In Me installation view. Photographed by Charlie Hillhouse
Woman 3 (Gilda from Marrickville) 2018-2019 Acrylic on poly 170 x 120cm Photographed by Nicholas Alsosio-Shearer
Natalya Hughes would like to acknowledge that this project has been assisted by the Government through the Australia Council.
MILANI GALLERY
240 Montague Road West End, Brisbane 4101 +61 7 3846 6046
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