Confronting Femininity showcases three Brisbane women artists of different generations who present femininity in extremis: Rosemary Laing (1959–2024), Natalya Hughes (1977–), and Michaela Stark (1994–). The works both confront familiar western conceptions of femininity and make femininity confronting.

Natalya Hughes is known for critically reworking representations of women by western male modernists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Willem De Kooning. However, her new paintings, addressing the Parisian fashion illustrator and costume designer Erté (Romaine de Tirtoff), embrace, endorse, and extend his adventures in hyperfemininity. In her mannerist reworkings, the female bodies have been removed, and the garments collaged, allowing us to focus fetishistically on flirty finery; the architecture of corsets, ribbons, bows, and ruffles; the poetry of pleats, folds, and gathers. These technologies—perhaps designed to keep female sexuality and pleasure under wraps—become exuberant explosions of it. Rather than critique the language of femininity, Hughes doubles down.

Curated by Sal Edwards, Robert Leonard.