Petrina Hicks

Petrina Hicks has been recognised through many prestigious awards and grants for her large-scale, hyper-real photographs and video works that are as beautiful as they are unsettling. Her slick, stylized images at once entice and disconcert the viewer. At first glance her luminous works draw you in, much like the sensuous advertising imagery they reference and co-opt. Yet look closer and subtle ruptures and ambiguities surface, unsettling the promise of perfection embedded in each image. In so doing, Hicks weighs in on photography’s dual role as both truth-teller and perpetrator of fictions.

Hicks was recognised in 2021 with her first international mid-career survey at the Australian Embassy, Paris. This follows her acclaimed survey at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 2019. Her work has been shown widely both in Australia and internationally including recently at The Barbican, London; Biennal of Photography, Mexico City; Internationell Konst Film Utställning, Jönköping Läns Museum, Sweden; Conciergerie, Paris; International Contemporary Arts Festival SESC_Vidobrasil, Sao Paulo; Fotoseptiembre, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico; Pingyao International Photography Festival, China and Paris Photo, France. Hicks is represented in major institutional collections throughout Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of Western Australia and Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art.