Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic is the first major survey exhibition of celebrated Australian photographer Petrina Hicks. Over her fifteen-year career, Hicks has gained a strong reputation for her enigmatic, multi-layered and beautiful photographs. The exhibition includes more than forty photograph and video works spanning the period 2003 to 2019. Seen together for the first time, Hicks’s shimmering and often surreal compositions convey the inherent ambiguity and complexity of the female experience.

Drawing on mythology and art history, Hicks’ works rely almost exclusively on the ethereal nature of her models (including an albino cabaret dancer, snakes and an award-winning hairless cat) and are imbued with the tension between seduction and danger, familiarity and strangeness, intimacy and distance.

This free exhibition is showing at the NGV Australia until 15 March 2020.

IMAGE CAPTION: Petrina Hicks Australia born 1972, Serpentina II 2015, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being series 2015, pigment inkjet print, 100.0 x 100.0 (image). Collection of the artist, courtesy Michael Reid, Sydney; and This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne © Petrina Hicks. Courtesy of Michael Reid, Sydney; and This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne