In 1991 Bob Hawke was Prime Minister of Australia, The Simpsons debuted on Channel 10, Boris Becker beat Ivan Lendl in the Australian Open Tennis Championship, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the web browser, Nirvana released Nevermind, and Stills Gallery opened its doors at 16 Elizabeth Street, Paddington. At the time Founder and Co-Director, Kathy Freedman announced “There’s a lot of very important and exciting work being done at present using photographic images. Stills will …

Rather than using her camera to capture an image of the world, Petrina Hicks creates a world for her camera. Within her studio, she assembles sculptural forms with a meticulous eye for detail - the shape of a vase, the fall of fabric, the pinkness of a shell. Her subjects, whether people or objects, are loaded with symbolism and exist within a strangely placeless reality, making them hard to pin down. In her recent profile on Petrina Hicks’ writer Carrie Miller describes this process as on…

SEASON 11 Exhibition - 16 November to 22 December 2011 GILBERT GARCIN / PETRINA HICKS / MARK KIMBER / MARKETA LUSKACOVA / DANIELLE THOMPSON Each year Stills Gallery celebrates the passing of the year with a group exhibition drawn from Stills Gallery artists. This year displays new and unseen works drawn from larger series and bodies of work. Centrestage are brightly coloured concoctions from a new series Hippy and the Snake by the ever popular Petrina…

PETRINA HICKSBeautiful Creatures2 MARCH to 9 APRIL 2011Petrina Hicks’ Beautiful Creatures appeals to our senses. Immediately alluring the large-scale, hyper-real photographs, are all rendered so clearly and with such control that they are reminiscent of advertisements, promoting a slick new television series perhaps, or teen clothing range. But with a series of little ruptures, within images and between them, Hicks disrupts our usually beg…

SEASON10Narelle Autio / Pat Brassington / Petrina Hicks / Mark Kimber / William Lamson / Polixeni Papapetrou / Trent Parke / Robyn Stacey / William YangNovember 17 to December 22, 2010Reopens January 18 to 29, 2011In SEASON10 we are featuring a mix of unseen images and work selected from previous series by each artist, with an emphasis on summer and celebration. Narelle Autio’s

PETRINA HICKS Every Rose Has Its Thorn 7 July to 14 August 2010 Petrina Hicks is adept at using the seductive and glossy language of commercial photography to create works that probe the false promises of perfection. Every Rose Has Its Thorn, is a precursor to a larger exhibition to be held in early 2011. The works have been created during a number of overseas residencies that became possible after winning the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award in 2008 with the unsettling…

Petrina Hicks' immaculate large-scale portraiture represents something more than individual likeness. Beneath the highly polished and controlled surface of her images lies an eerie, unsettling psychological distance. Hicks' works probe those dualities that are at the heart of contemporary photography – traversing the fine lines between closeness and distance, between perfection and imperfection and between truth and falseness. For Hicks these are qualities that punctuate the continuum from an…