Mythologies

We are thrilled to announce the return of Petrina Hicks to the West Australian capital with her upcoming solo exhibition, Mythologies, at Perth Council House Gallery.

Co-presented by the Perth Centre for Photography and our offsite projects platform, Michael Reid Beyond, this expansive public installation will mark the release of a spectacular suite of new works by the artist.

Staged alongside some of the most arresting and indelible images from Hicks’s archive and a suite of new sculptural works by acclaimed Perth-based contemporary artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, these four new releases will form an exclusive preview of an upcoming body of work by Hicks that will debut later this year at the Museum of Australian Photography in Melbourne.

Hicks is among Australia’s most esteemed and globally celebrated contemporary artists, having honed her distinctive photographic style and cemented her place at the forefront of her field over an extraordinary career spanning more than two decades.

The artist’s meticulously choreographed images are lensed with a heightened degree of precision that conjures an air of hyperreality, quoting and subverting the coolly seductive visual language of advertising while drawing motifs and symbolic allusions from classical mythology, folklore and art history.

Hovering in porous, indistinct spaces between different states of being – human and animal, adolescent and adult, static and inchoate – Hicks’s animals, totemic objects and female subjects project a beguiling equipoise against crisp, ambiguous backdrops, with their outward polish, stillness and quietude appealingly undercut by tension, eroticism or disquiet.

“In Hicks’s work we are drawn to the tiniest gesture or detail amplified beyond mundane reality into a zone of the imaginary,” writes curator Isobel Crombie in the monograph published to coincide with the artist’s major 2018 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, Bleached Gothic.

Hicks’s Perth exhibition will be the capstone to a remarkable year, continuing a national tour and arriving soon after the record-smashing sale of her 2005 work Shenae & Jade at auction – a fantastic result for the artist and a watershed moment for the contemporary photography market more broadly.

To register interest in Mythologies by Petrina Hicks and receive early previews of her upcoming releases, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au