GRACE WRIGHT

Wright’s atmospheric paintings are all-consuming, inviting the viewer into a baroque world of tangled gestures. Markings on the canvas twist and convulse about themselves to build an anarchic structure before unravelling to moments of repose. While Wright’s gestures may be abstract, she views her paintings as representational narratives, evoking the tempestuous rhythm of the natural world, while alluding to 17th-century religious paintings.

Deep Symmetry explores a recent evolution of Wright’s practice as a result of her time in Europe in the latter half of 2022. Its title was inspired by the architectural geometries of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, France, and a quote by writer Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Life is irregularity, death is geometry”.

Wright has been long fascinated with the deeper, universal connections that exist beyond our normal comprehension. Marrying alluring, harmonious colour with visceral imagery to monumental standing, Wright’s paintings are a reflection of this deep connectedness; her coiling energetic brush marks echoing the universal ‘rhythmic, cyclical nature’ forms in our world, to emotion and the force of life itself.

As Wright discusses: “if we look beneath, nature (birth, growth and death) are all expressions of a deeper symmetry, a principle of balance, but often one that operates beyond our comprehension. In a similar way, my work appears chaotic on the surface yet each painting has its own kind of hidden harmony. I like to think of each work as its own world, with its own gravity, tension and release”.

Creating works that present a duality between light and darkness as symbolic of those present in the world around us, such as day and night, the changing seasons, or the waning and waxing moon, Deep Symmetry presents a new body of work that expands upon Wright’s poetic exploration of our relationships with the natural forces of the world and the act of painting.