Richie Kuhaupt’s Woman In Red is an elongated mannequin figure who sits confidently in her natural milieu, the shopping centre. Unlike her pale and passive shop-mannequin sisters, she is bold and assertive, whilst her distorted body image is an ironic comment at the time, and perhaps still today, of society’s obsession with ultra-thin supermodels.

The artwork is based on French artist Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, offering a 21st Century version with a female figure as the subject. Like many of Kuhaupt’s artworks, humour is central to the way that the artwork is engaged with. The elongated body coupled with the reference to Rodin’s The Thinker suggests that the ‘mannequin’ is pondering her place in today’s society and prompts the viewer to think about how bodies are engaged with and represented in contemporary Australia.

Winner of the 2000 Invitation Art Prize