Grace Wright’s Painted Cacophonies Entice and Repel in Equal Measure
Grace Wright's gestural paintings are situated in the trajectory of Abstract Expressionism, yet a studio visit with the New Zealand artist confirms they engage with much more.
Grace Wright, The Passing Of Spring (2021). Acrylic on linen. 140 x 200 cm. Courtesy Gallery 9.
Just as Wright's brushstrokes twist in varying ways, so does the artist's relationship with a cacophony of influences, from Western art history to dance, nature, and technology.
In Alpha Paradise, Wright's inaugural show with Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland in 2020, elements of 17th-century painting floated to the surface of large, richly layered acrylic paintings harbouring coiling compositions rendered in the contrasting colour combinations of the Baroque. Across the gallery, Prussian blues, viridian greens, bright yellows, moody umbers, turquoises, and pinks bloomed.
Final Fantasy (2020), the largest work in the Gow Langsford show at over 3.66 metres in length, erupts with drama. Dark green tonal variations and murky browns are backlit in places, while strokes unfurl in ecstasy, anger, or panic at different points.
The artist explains how the paintings developed following New Zealand's first Covid lockdown, reflecting how the enforced isolation had made nature's colours appear far more intense to her, evoking ideas around 'some kind of uncertain cosmic future'.
The cosmic reference speaks to the influence of mystic artist Hilma af Klint, Wright having studied the radical painter while completing her MFA at Auckland University in 2019.
With the legacy of af Klint in mind, it makes sense that Wright's influences are not embedded in the work as consciously as the organised chaos of Wright's particular style might suggest. They owe much to the subconscious, albeit channelled through rules of pictorial engagement.
Working without preparatory drawings, Wright allows her unconscious mind to lead the work—a process recalling the automatic writing and interest in the subconscious pioneered by Surrealism, which Wright also cites as an influence—albeit within strict parameters. She pre-mixes her colours and rotates the canvas 180 degrees as she paints.
In discussing the painter Albert Oehlen, whose abstraction also dallies with Surrealist methodology, Wright recalls viewing his work at the New Museum in 2015, demonstrating to her how painting could be 'so much more'.
These are not 'pretty paintings'; they are works that want to enthral and repulse in equal measure to create a visceral experience.
Following that encounter, Wright's more graphic work gradually gave way to fluid paintings revelling in increasing complexity.
An exhibition at the gallery Parlour Projects in early 2020, entitled Fantasia for a Late Night, revealed a leap forward in the artist's approach. Seven large-scale paintings, including a monumental triptych, presented smears of pigments and tangled fleshy corkscrews of paint, which both clustered together and sprung apart.
Though Wright's background as a dancer and musician is often linked to the rhythmical action of her painting, the artist's engagement with the body can also be seen in the intestine-like brushstrokes that unfurl across the canvas, and the blushes of pink and blood-red that suggest oozing wounds or congealed blood.
The painting Underestimating Courage (2021), presented earlier this year in the exhibition Making it all seem real at Sydney's Gallery 9, is a hot maelstrom of reds and pinks, with blue rippling through the work like veins. One is either looking at a fiery galaxy or a throbbing mass under the skin.
These are not 'pretty paintings'; they are works that want to enthral and repulse in equal measure to create a visceral experience.
Wright uses scale to engage the audience's body in physically viewing the work but also as a means to insert her own body—the female body—into the large canvases associated with the white, male American expressionists.
Finding New Ways of Belonging (2021), also presented in the Sydney show, unleashes paint in hurtling strokes across two canvases joined together to create a five-metre work. Awash with purples, light blues, and dirty browns, the work could be read from left to right, with darkness ceding to light or vice versa, where light is sucked into a blackening storm, prompting thoughts of creation myths, science fiction, apocalyptic possibilities, and new beginnings.
The works comprise grand, sweeping gestures and worked-up pockets of hysteria that are overwhelming and deeply personal. Wormholes threaten to draw you into an abyss or repel you backwards to consider a world from afar.
In this particular brand of abstraction, linear progression is a myth in a world experienced through extreme shifts of scale and different subconscious and conscious interpretations. —[O]
