Announcing Representation of Grace Wright

23 May 2022

Yavuz Gallery is pleased to announce representation of New Zealand artist, Grace Wright. 

Taipei Dangdai and Art Basel Hong Kong 2022 mark Wright’s first presentation in North Asia. The artist’s first solo exhibition at Yavuz is scheduled for early 2023.

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.

Using scale to her advantage, her abstract paintings engulf the viewer, exuding traditionally masculine virtues of power and strength into large canvases typically associated with male American expressionists. ‘As a female body’, Wright muses, ‘I would enter a ‘transcendent’, ‘no mind’ state allowing the painting to come through me’. Gestures might then be read as an extension of her body, with their pulsating rhythm; a key methodology of Wright’s practice.

Wright’s paintings are a reflection of her world view, her coiling brush marks echoing the ‘rhythmic, cyclical nature’ she identifies as universal forms in the natural world. Wright marries alluring, harmonious colour with visceral imagery to elevate the feminine to monumental standing.

Grace Wright was born in 1992 in New Zealand, and holds a MFA and BFA from the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine Arts. She has exhibited her works across New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. In 2019, Wright was awarded Second Runner Up at the Wallace Art Awards, one of the top art prizes in New Zealand. She has also been a finalist in the New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award (2015, 2016) and Molly Morpeth Canaday Art Award, New Zealand (2015). Wright has been profiled and her works highlighted by publications such Ocula (2022), Art Collector Magazine (2021), and Art News New Zealand (2020). She is also represented by Gow Langsford Gallery, New Zealand and Gallery 9, Australia.

_{Images: (top) Grace Wright, photo by Anna Wright; (middle) Grace Wright, At The End Of All This, 2022, acrylic on linen, 200 x 170 cm}