Spring Suite of exhibitions launch at Penrith Regional Gallery,
Home of The Lewers Bequest on Saturday 17 August 2024
Penrith Regional Gallery, Home of the Lewers Bequest is delighted to announce an inspiring suite of exhibitions showcasing the work of Natalya Hughes, Karlina Mitchell and the Open Studio program, opening in August 2024.
Natalya Hughes: The Interior
Natalya Hughes, one of Australia’s most exciting artists, is known for her explorations of decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the human form, and excess. Recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between Modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects.
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.
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.
The exhibition is presented by the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) and toured by Museums & Galleries Queensland.
Karlina Mitchell: Vuvale
Vuvale is an exhibition of new works by Blue Mountains artist, Karlina Mitchell. Mitchell is an artist of multicultural heritage, with Fijian and German ancestry, whose work unpacks the ways that culture is enacted and re-enacted in the diaspora. With this exhibition, Mitchell invokes the Fijian term, vuvale, a word in the Fijian language which translates to English as meaning family, the home, and extended community. It is a word with religious connotations, Vu meaning God and Vale meaning to watch over the house, which Mitchell correlates in her work.
Created specifically for Lewers House, this immersive installation interrogates the ways in which diasporic communities express notions of identity, self and communal, beginning in the home and extending through their communities.
To be continued is a presentation of artworks, experiments, and learnings from the Penrith Regional Art Gallery’s Open Studio program. The exhibition centres around the process by which artistic ideas are formed and adapted. It is a culmination of individual research projects developed by local secondary school students, with a shared interest in expanding a drawing practice into new areas. To be continued includes works in progress and will continue to evolve over the exhibition period.
Participating artists were selected via a competitive application process. They have been participating in weekly sessions at Nepean Creative and Performing Arts High School since May and have guided the artwork selection and exhibition design.
August Open Day
17 August 10am-2pm with an official opening of the exhibitions held at 1pm and is FREE.
