Petrina Hicks: Bleached Gothic is the first major survey exhibition of photographer Petrina Hicks. Over her fifteen-year career, Hicks has gained a strong reputation for her large-scale, hyperreal photographs that subvert and disrupt the photographic language of advertising and portraiture. Hicks photographs children, animals and young women against simple backgrounds, returning to the same models and motifs frequently to define and hone her distinctive style.
Hicks’s photographs are notable for their duality; pristine and benign at first glance, the works are undercut with a sense of the uncanny. The tension between seduction and danger, familiarity and strangeness, intimacy and distance are present in many of Hicks’s works, which are rich with mythological and historical symbolism.
